


The Wilde Letters

by PyrrhaIphis



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Alternate History, Dystopia, Gen, Homophobia, Original Character-centric, Propaganda, Swearing, Thirty Years Later, internet research
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-22 19:27:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 52,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13770930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PyrrhaIphis/pseuds/PyrrhaIphis
Summary: Welcome to President Reynolds' America, AD 2017.  It isn't a pretty picture.  As bad as things were in 1984, they've gotten even worse.  Take a tour of a 2017 even worse than the real one was, courtesy of a 40-something museum professional who stumbles across a letter addressed to Oscar Wilde inside an old book.  As she explores the mystery of the letter (which, among other things, describes a UFO), she finds herself stumbling across some names familiar to us, but unknown to her, names like Curt Wild and Brian Slade....This was my July CampNaNo project from 2017.  The first chapter opens with a lengthy Author's Note to explain a few important things about this fic in more detail.  Please read that note before beginning to read the fic.  (General advance warning, however:  this is not my usual fluff.  It is not, perhaps, as grim is it rightfully should be, but neither is it warm-and-fluffy.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First, I want to explain the reasoning behind this dystopian version of 2017. Obviously, I was very distressed by how 2017 was proceeding (and I'm no happier with 2018, thus far), so when I had the plot idea about the letter in the book, it became a way of exploring my fears regarding where we might be headed. But I also saw it as a chance to let "Velvet Goldmine"'s setting live up to the description of 1984's New York in the script: "The burnt-out remains of New York CIty and the subtitle: NEW YORK CITY, 1984. 1984 New York is a decadent, seventies vision of an apocalyptic future: a bombed-out, expressionistic city from which most people, wealthy or white, have already fled." The route from the movie's 1984 to this fic's 2017 included some worst-case scenarios, but most of them are based on events and trends from the real events between 1984 and 2017.
> 
> Second, as I mentioned, the plot idea of a letter inside a book was what sparked this fic. Specifically, it was sparked when I was adding a new donation to the computer system at work, and found an envelope inside a book. In that case, it was a wedding invitation from 1901, and I felt 100% certain that it had been purposefully put in the book as a way to get it to the museum without being damaged in the process of being shipped halfway across the country, but it sparked a more general idea about someone finding a series of letters inside old books, leading them to learn secrets about our glittery heroes. Once that was combined with the dystopian setting, I knew I was going to have to create a lead who was believable, hopefully relatable, and stable. Given all that, I decided it was probably easiest if I based her on myself. So our lead is about 75-90% a self-insert, and I thought I should own up to that right up front, as I know a lot of people hate self-inserts. Like me, she's 42, from St. Louis, works in historic preservation, has social phobias, and grew up in a house where music with vocals was pretty much only permitted if it was Disney or the Muppets, leading to eclectic tastes in music and huge gaps in knowledge of musical history. (Seriously, until I saw this movie, I'd never heard of glam rock. And I had to be told who the characters were inspired by.) Even more pertinently, like me, she is asexual and aromantic. (So there's no wish-fulfillment pairing going on here. She remains utterly uninterested in love throughout.) There are differences between us as well, of course. Her social phobia isn't nearly as strong as mine (no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't write her acting as socially inept as I am and still advance the plot) and unlike me, she actually has advanced degrees, whereas I still only have a BA. Also, her job is at a terrible place, but I work at a very nice little museum. Oh, and she's actually part of the whole "smart phone" thing, while I've been using the same flip phone since 2008. (I may have to downgrade to a smart phone though, which royally sucks. I liked only having to pay $90 for a year of service. Those smart phone things demand payment every month!)
> 
> I think that's all I needed to tell you. Thanks for reading this note. I hope you'll still give the fic a look.

            No matter how hard she was pressed for an answer, Elizabeth couldn’t have explained just what it was that felt so oppressive about being at her desk.  Most people might have assumed it was because she worked in a library.  But that was absurd.  She had felt quite at home in the half dozen campus libraries she’d been in over the years.  Even public libraries felt more comfortable than being at work, despite that the public libraries were painfully quiet, while there was no rule against talking at the President Reynolds Memorial Library.

            Of course, even without a rule requiring silence, most visitors—and employees—tended to keep their silence as much as possible.  Not that there were ever very many visitors.  Around the second half of any given semester, they tended to get a few dozen students in looking to research term papers, and at odd times they’d get professors or journalists, but mostly no one was interested in their collection.  And why _would_ they be?  Elizabeth certainly wasn’t.  Most boring fucking collection she’d ever seen.

            Still, it wasn’t the quiet that bothered her.  She liked quiet.  Even if she had trouble _finding_ quiet outside of working hours.

            Some of it was probably her co-workers.  Though they were mostly ten to fifteen years younger than she was—or maybe precisely _because_ they were so young!—they were all distressingly pro-establishment.  It’s not as though Elizabeth expected to find any young revolutionaries working for a conservative cornerstone like CRA, but she’d have appreciated at least having someone her own age who had been inculcated in the beliefs of their hippie parents.  But maybe no hippies had ever settled down to raise families in Missouri.  Somehow, that wouldn’t surprise her one bit.

            “How’s it going in here?”  Darryl Kirkland popped his head into her half-office, smiling down at Elizabeth.  “Gotten the items in that donation accessioned yet?”

            “I’m working on it,” she assured him, with a deep sigh.  “Um, I could do the job faster if you didn’t, uh, have me transcribing the letters as I’m putting them in the catalog.”

            “I’ve seen how fast you type.  Transcription shouldn’t slow you down any.”

            Elizabeth grimaced.  “Y-yeah, but these letters are—they’re pretty much, um, chicken scratch.”  She displayed the letter she was currently trying to transcribe.  It was a letter written by Reynolds’ great-grandmother towards the end of her days, written in a shaking hand which even the best would have trouble deciphering.  And Elizabeth had never been very good at reading other people’s handwriting in the first place.

            “Just do the best you can, honey,” Darryl said, giving her a patronizing pat on the head.  “If it’s important, they’ll send it to someone else.”

            “Yes, sir,” Elizabeth said, with her usual irritated resignation.  What the _fuck_ was his problem, calling her ‘honey’ as if she was still some goddamned teenager?!  She was over forty, for God’s sake!  And no one with as many degrees as she had should be dismissed so readily as incapable of handling important documents.  She was great at handling important documents.  She just wasn’t so good at _reading_ them.

            Though Darryl was certainly right that these letters were anything but important.  A letter from the late President’s great-grandmother to his grandmother, primarily complaining about the weather, was hardly of critical state importance, or of any other kind, for that matter.  Unless, perhaps, one was just fascinated by 19th century weather.

            “Come to think of it,” Darryl said, as soon as Elizabeth tried to get back to work, “I still haven’t received your RSVP for the company’s 4th of July celebrations.”

            “Oh, uh, yes, but…um…wasn’t it only for, you know, if we’re coming?  Like, we don’t have to RSVP in the negative?”

            “Yes, but _of course_ you’re coming.”  Darryl’s tone brooked no argument.  Not that anything about Darryl ever _did_ brook argument.  (Whatever that actually meant when it was at home.)  He was at that unpleasant age—about mid-fifties—where pretty much all of his professional life had been in the sheltered aegis of the Reynolds Age.  He had lived through the ‘60s and ‘70s, the days before Reynolds, but they were unimportant to him, childhood and teen years, before anything going on in the world had any strong impact on him.  Or that was what Elizabeth assumed, since it seemed like almost everyone in Darryl’s age group worshiped the ground Reynolds I had walked on.

            “Um…actually…I—”

            “Don’t worry, I already put it in the system that you’re coming,” Darryl said, patting her shoulder in an all too familiar way.  “I know how scatterbrained you are.”

            “I’m really not,” Elizabeth tried to explain, but Darryl wasn’t listening; he was already on his way out the office, off to harass some other innocent employee.

            Feeling safe in the knowledge that her boss wouldn’t be coming back so soon, Elizabeth set aside her work and took out her phone.  No point in accessing the Internet on her computer; the company would be monitoring everything that happened on her laptop.  But so long as her phone didn’t connect to the company’s WiFi, she should be able to go online without being caught out.

            The anonymity of the ‘net gave Elizabeth the courage she needed to do _something_ to fight back against Darryl.

            She logged into a dummy e-mail account she’d set up years back, and went to the phone directory’s review site, selecting a particularly nondescript user name for her ‘review’.  “went to reynolds musuem yestiday,” she wrote, forcing herself to use misspellings and poor grammar, things that were usually her Kryptonite.  “it sucked the boss camed out and telled us we was too noisy hes an asshole named darryl and i hope he gets his dick stuck in a manhole cover and dies”

            No, too obvious.

            Hastily, Elizabeth deleted the review and got back to work.

 

***

 

            Given the day she’d had, Elizabeth would have preferred to go out to lunch.  But she didn’t have the cash for it.  Not that the lunches in the building’s cafeteria were free—or even affordable—but she could just swipe her ID and they’d take the cost of her lunch out of her next paycheck.  The food was kind of shit, but at least it _was_ food.

            The lunchroom was a terrible place to sit and eat alone, though.  Since the use of cell phones was prohibited in most parts of the building, there was nothing to distract her from the terrible taste of her meal but the enormous company logo painted on one wall.  It was an unattractive and unimaginative logo, the three words of the company’s name playing at being a completed crossword puzzle of particularly puny dimensions:  “Central” and “Aeronautics” were written horizontally, with “Reactive” vertical between them, connecting with the “a” in “Central” and the “e” in “Aeronautics.  If Elizabeth had been designing the logo, she’d have had at least a little fighter plane circling the name, maybe some tiny explosions on it where the plane had attacked it.  Be a little illustrative, if nothing else.

            Elizabeth was distracted from her idle contemplation of the company’s logo by the sound of loud laughter at the table behind her.  Sounded like a bunch of shitheads were trading offensive stories again.  She contemplated moving, but that might get their attention, like running from something immortal.  Better to stay where she was and finish eating as soon as possible.

            The voice that picked up the story in progress was Denver Colby Kirkland, technically part of the library department, but usually to be found in any part of the building _other_ than the library.  But he could get away with any shit he chose to pull, because who was going to punish him when his father was a Vice-President of the company?

            After the story’s final burst of laughter died down, one of the other men picked up the conversation.  “Got any plans for the weekend, Denver?”

            “You know I do!” Denver laughed.  “I’m taking a hot chick to Branson.”  Elizabeth fought the urge to gag.  “Gonna get me some action.”

            “Too bad,” the other man’s voice said sadly.  “Guess you’ll miss out on the fun.”

            “I’ll be having my own fun,” Denver chuckled.  “But what is it you’ve got planned?”

            “We’ve got some action of our own lined up,” another voice replied.  “Those freaks in the Grove are holding a bake sale or something, trying to give them something to feel proud of.”  Elizabeth wanted to go over there and explain to them just how badly they had misinterpreted Pride Month.  But what would they do to her if she did?

            “How is _that_ action?” Denver asked, sounding flummoxed, as usual.  Whatever his appeal was to the cheap and standardless, it certainly wasn’t his brain power.  Presumably, it was his father’s bank account.

            “We’re gonna go and throw things at them, of course!” Denver’s first friend exclaimed, amid his own raucous laughter.  “Thought condoms filled with ketchup might fit the bill.”

            “No, no, red paint, not ketchup.  Ketchup isn’t a big enough statement,” the second friend insisted.

            Statement.  Harassing innocent people minding their own business was already as strong a statement as anyone needed to make:  it was shouting at the top of one’s lungs “I’m an asshole!”  Why not just wear a T-shirt with that message on it, instead of bothering other people?

 

***

 

            The week dragged on slowly.  Mostly, Elizabeth’s days were filled up with trying to catalog the new donations that had come in—largely more letters from so many generations back that no one would have guessed the future Big Brother would come from their stock, broken up by the occasional document about CRA’s early history, before it branched out from airplanes into weaponry—and she found the work mind-numbingly boring.  The monotony was tragically broken up by a school group who came in on a day when the library’s sole docent had called in sick, forcing Elizabeth to deal with the school group despite how incapable she was of talking to strangers.

            Trying to explain to a room full of teenagers just how different the world had been before Reynolds I came to power in 1980 was all but impossible.  Luckily, they were mostly too busy looking at their phones to pay much attention to her, but their teachers kept eying her suspiciously every time she talked about the days before Reynolds.  Not that Elizabeth _remembered_ those days; she had only been five when Reynolds was elected.  The question and answer session afterwards was just as agonizing.

            “Does the President ever come visit?” was one of the first things they asked.  It was _always_ the first thing anyone asked.

            “No, President Reynolds is much too busy to make such visits,” Elizabeth told them.  “Uh, but I heard he came when the library was first opened.  Of course, like, that was before he was, you know, um, President yet.  The library opened during Brown’s third term in office.”  She shook her head.  “Besides, there are, uh, lots of other libraries and museums, um, dedicated to his father.  If the President wanted to visit one, he’d go to one of the ones on the East Coast.”  Both coasts liked to forget St. Louis existed.  Which was not always a bad thing, in Elizabeth’s opinion.  It kept people like the Presidents Reynolds from even bothering to come to town in the first place.

            “Why’s an arms dealer running a museum, anyway?” another kid asked, prompting a lot of mean-spirited laughter from his fellows.

            Elizabeth wanted to tell them to fuck off.  She wanted to tell them she didn’t want to be there any more than they did—probably she wanted it even less!—and that they had no right to laugh at her.  “CRA is a weapons manufacturer, not an arms dealer,” she corrected by rote.  Commonly made mistake.  And not really much of a difference.  “And, um, they— _we_ —do still make airplanes, too.  Mostly fighters for the Air Force, of course.  Uh, and after he left the Air Force at the end of the Korean War, Reynolds I got a job with CRA, as a test pilot and source of information about, y’know, what it’s actually like in combat.”  Not that there was a heck of a lot of aerial combat in the Korean War, as far as Elizabeth knew, but what did that even matter?

            Of course, her mention of the Korean War sparked a long and painful discussion between the students about the various wars of the 20th century.  Their lack of understanding of the chronology was terrifying.  How did they not know which came first, Korea or Vietnam?  And how could they be so clueless about which _decade_ the wars took place in?  Admittedly, before she took this job, Elizabeth wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint the exact years of the Korean War, but she had certainly always known it had been in the 1950s.  For most purposes, that was enough.

            When the kids got onto the subject of discussing the Crusade, mostly in glowing terms of excited praise, Elizabeth couldn’t take it anymore.  She turned to their teachers—who weren’t doing jack shit to rein them in—and said that she really had very important work to do, and to please supervise the children during the rest of their visit.  Then, like a coward, she retreated back to her half-office.  How could a bunch of kids who hadn’t even been born yet think they knew anything about the war?  Hadn’t their parents told them how horrible it had been?  They only had television and Hollywood to teach them about it, apparently.  As if anyone could trust _those_ sources!

            It was the worst day she’d had in years.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was no way to say this within the text without it reading as horribly awkward and unnatural, and this probably goes without saying, but the Manchester mentioned in the first paragraph is a street, not Arthur's hometown. :P It's pretty much the only non-highway east-west thoroughfare that goes from downtown St. Louis all the way to the suburbs. (It's about ten miles from downtown, where I work, to the suburb where I live. And Manchester is the only non-highway street that allows the commute without going miles out of your way north or south.) But it gets shut down in the Grove on weekends several times during the summer. (When it's just for Pride Fest, that's not so bad, because there are side streets you can take to get around it, but when it's a bicycle race, you're pretty much screwed. Though since I wrote this, I've gotten back into the habit of highway driving, so it's no longer such a big deal for me as it was last summer.)

            By the time the weekend came, Elizabeth needed to do something to relax.  And the weather was surprisingly cool for June—barely above 90°!—so she decided she’d head down to the Grove and see what was really going on.  She found Manchester blocked off, and a stage set up in the middle of the street, with Pride Month festivities all up and down the closed portion of the street.  Several tents had been set up with vendors inside, selling things to raise money for one of the few gay rights organizations that hadn’t been driven underground by Reynolds II and his two predecessors.

            Though she didn’t have much money to spend—and she was trying to save her little ‘mad money’ for a new dress for Yuzu—Elizabeth couldn’t resist the urge to look around inside.  The part of her that wanted nice things was always hoping for a miracle find:  a Kenner Blythe being sold as if worthless, a 1959 Barbie mistaken for a 1990s reproduction, a rare first edition book being sold on the cheap by an ignoramus.  Of course, in this age of the Internet, there wasn’t much chance of those things ever happening.  Sellers had too much access to accurate information to underprice their goods.  Though sometimes a really unusual old doll might slip under the radar, an unlabelled Kimport or something.  It was always worth a look.  And it was to support a good cause, after all.

            She was looking at a bookseller’s table when she overheard the conversation between two of the people running the event.  “People like that make me sick,” one of them was saying.  “We have the same natural rights they do!”

            “At least the one of them was so stupid he spilled his paint balloon all over himself,” the other laughed.  “Bet he’ll have trouble explaining that one to whoever does his laundry!”

            Fuck.  They’d actually gone and done it.  Elizabeth had really been hoping they wouldn’t do it, that they were just trying to impress Denver.

            Even though the actions of her co-workers were hardly her fault, she couldn’t help feeling a guilt nagging at her.  Maybe if she spent the money she’d been saving up for that gorgeous dress on Etsy, she’d feel better about it.  It wasn’t as though Yuzu _needed_ a steampunk outfit.  Besides, maybe one of the vendors was selling doll clothes or something…

            But she didn’t get away from the bookseller’s table without spotting something that her eyes didn’t want to look away from.

            It was just a leather-bound book with gilt decorations on the spine, nestled among dozens of others.  The others had clean, crisp leather; they were those tacky books released in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, produced in mass quantities and yet labeled as ‘limited leather-bound editions’ to encourage idiots to spend ludicrous amounts of money on them.

            But that one book among them was different.  It wasn’t that cheap, textured, overly-dyed leather; it was soft and rich, in a natural deep brown, and gently worn with the caress of countless decades.  The gilt scrollwork was elaborate, too, utterly unlike anything on those modern pieces of crap.

            The others had full titles and authors written on their spines, but the book that had captured Elizabeth so completely simply had “Wilde” written about a third of the way down from the top, and the Roman numeral “I” near the base.

            Gently—and instinctively wishing for the protective cotton gloves she always wore while handling old books at work—Elizabeth lifted the book out from between the others that didn’t deserve to be in its company, and found that the gilt scrollwork was even more elaborate on the front cover.  The scrollwork surrounded an illustration of a classical Greek column, topped with a vase full of green carnations.  Written on the column were the words “The Genius of Oscar Wilde I”.

            Elizabeth carefully opened the book, expecting the usual missing and damaged pages, or end papers marred by generations of youthful scribbles.  But the pages were perfect, their gilt edging still fresh as if the book was almost entirely unhandled, and the endpapers were of beautiful, untouched marbled paper.  Turning the pages until she got to the title page (and doing her best not to look at the loose sheet of paper with the price written on it inserted just before the title page), she found that the full name of the book was _The Complete and Undiluted Genius of Oscar Wilde, Volume I_.  The publisher information on the next page was largely written in French, but she didn’t need to use Google Translate to recognize the word “Paris” or the Roman numerals for 1900.

            A little concerned, she kept going to the table of contents, but found that everything was titled in English, so despite its Parisian publisher, it seemed not to have been translated into French.  The table of contents listed almost two dozen short stories—far more than she had ever heard of Wilde writing—and _The Picture of Dorian Gray_.  After that, it listed a page number for “Poetry, Part I”.  Presumably the other part of the poetry was in volume two, but Elizabeth wasn’t really the poetic type, so she wasn’t very concerned about that.

            It would have been nice if it had _The Importance of Being Earnest_ , but _Dorian Gray_ was one of the rare 19th century novels that Elizabeth actually liked.  And the book itself was so beautiful!  She rather felt she was falling in love with it, to her consternation.

            Turning back to the title page, she looked at the price label, and found that—underneath a crossed-off price in pounds—it was labeled $150.

            Honestly, that was a steal for this book.  Hand bound in Parisian leather in 1900, and containing classic literature that was also an entertaining read… _if_ it was a common edition, it would still be worth at least twice that much, and probably much more, considering its mint condition.  And Elizabeth was quite sure this edition was anything but common.

            But $150!  That went beyond what she’d been saving up for Yuzu’s dress and started eating into her rent money.

            Elizabeth looked up at the man selling the books.  At least, she _thought_ it was a man.  He was so androgynous that it was hard to be sure, and dressed rather more like a woman than a man.  But a careful inspection revealed an Adam’s apple, so he was _definitely_ a man.  Or started out as one; maybe he was halfway to becoming a she?  Or maybe he was going to be taking part in the drag show later that night.  He was definitely wearing lipstick and eyeliner.  Though if it had been Elizabeth, she’d have covered up that mole on his jaw while putting on the makeup.  And hopefully he was planning on wearing a wig if he was going to be in the drag show; dark hair in a Beatles cut was hardly appropriate for a drag queen.  Or anyone else in 2017, really.  That haircut had been charming in the ‘60s, but it had lost its appeal decades ago.

            “Um, is there any chance you might, uh, give me a bit of a discount on this book?” Elizabeth asked, trying her best to smile.  “I’m sort of broke right now…”

            The man just smiled at her, as if inviting her to make an offer.

            “Like, maybe…er…say…$100 instead of $150?”  If haggling in the movies was accurate, he’d make a counter-offer, like $145, and maybe she’d be able to talk him down to $125.  Or maybe she’d just take the counter-offer and have to borrow money to pay her rent.

            The man looked at her intently, with an expressionless face.  Was he accusing her?  Judging her?  Weighing her up?  Thinking of calling someone to have her removed?  Should she drop the book and run?

            Quite suddenly, he smiled, and nodded, then picked up an iPad with the Square attached, before holding out his hand towards her for payment.

            “Oh, uh, here…”  Hastily, Elizabeth got her credit card out of her wallet and handed it over.  Only after he swiped the card did she realize that he could have charged her anything he wanted and there wouldn’t be anything she could do about it.  Well, apart from complaining to the credit card company, but she doubted they’d give a shit.  She was the type of customer they hated:  she always paid her balance in full at the end of the month, and had signed a long-term deal without a monthly service fee, so they had no way of making significant money off of her.  They’d probably be happy she’d gotten ripped off.

            But the texted receipt came through to her phone almost immediately after she signed his iPad, and it told her that she’d been charged only $100.

            What a great deal!

            But god, what a terrible person she was to rip off that poor guy when he was trying to raise money for charity!

            She’d have to donate part of her salary next month or something to make up for it.  Maybe do some volunteer work, too.

            Wouldn’t make up for ripping off this nice man, though…

            While she was mentally beating herself up, the man carefully wrapped her new book up in silver-colored tissue paper and placed it in a glittery paper gift bag.  It looked like someone’s birthday present, not a purchase leaving a flea market.

            Hoping that her face wasn’t the color of a ripe tomato, Elizabeth thanked the man, and began heading back towards her car.  Now that she’d spent way too much money, she absolutely shouldn’t hang around.  Better to get her fat ass back to her apartment and do something very quiet and inexpensive.

            She didn’t get halfway to the edge of the tent before she heard a voice calling her name, however.  Turning in the direction of the voice, Elizabeth saw Opal hurrying towards her.  “I didn’t expect to see you here!” Opal exclaimed, giving her a big hug that Elizabeth wasn’t quite able to return.  Why were other people always so touchy-feely?  Who’d _want_ to touch someone like her?  She sure wouldn’t want that if their positions were reversed.

            “I just had some free time this morning, and thought I’d check it out,” Elizabeth explained with an uncomfortable smile.

            “But you didn’t come by our booth.”  Opal’s remonstrance was accompanied by an exaggerated pout.

            “I’m sorry.  I forgot you even had one.”  She wasn’t even sure Opal had mentioned that they were running a booth, but it would have sounded like an excuse if she’d said so.

            “Well, come on by now!  Crystal won’t forgive you if you leave without saying hi!”  Opal grabbed Elizabeth by the hand and began to drag her deeper into the tent.

            Elizabeth was _quite_ positive Crystal wouldn’t give a shit either way; she put up with Elizabeth because Crystal was the kind of woman to be friendly to all her girlfriend’s friends, but she didn’t actually seem to like Elizabeth in the slightest.  Not many people did, after all.  Even Elizabeth didn’t, really.

            The booth being shared by Opal and Crystal was, of course, selling jewelry.  Opal’s elegant gold and silver creations paired perfectly with Crystal’s uniquely cut precious and semi-precious stones.  Crystal gave her a tight smile as they approached the table, but it was no more genuine than the rainbow of colors in her hair.  “Are you finally coming out?” she asked, with what felt to Elizabeth like a mocking tone in her voice.

            “I’m not into girls.”  Why did everyone think she had be to a lesbian just because she had some lesbian friends?

            Crystal just laughed, shaking her head and sending her braids flying.

            Uncomfortably, Elizabeth started examining the merchandise on the table.  How did other people behave in situations like this?  Was she supposed to have some kind of witty retort handy for it whenever people laughed at her and implied she was lying?  Was she supposed to get angry?  Was she supposed to laugh, too?

            Why were people so fucking complicated?

            “Hey, have you given the farm any more thought?” Opal asked after a few minutes of silence.

            “I appreciate the offer, but I really don’t think it’s for me,” Elizabeth said.  “That would be a heck of a commute.  You’re looking at something over in Illinois, right?”

            “We were,” Crystal replied.

            “Someone else already bought it.”  Opal sighed.  “Damn shame.  It would have been awesome to be in walking distance of Cahokia.”

            “Your definition of ‘walking distance’ is not the same as mine,” Crystal said.  “I wouldn’t want to walk that.”

            Opal laughed.  “Anyway, now we’re looking at a place about an hour from here in the other direction.  It’s kind of a fixer-upper, but lots of land, and the buildings have a lot of potential.  You really should think about joining us.  You don’t want to keep spending all your money on rent, do you?”

            “Of course not, but…”  Elizabeth sighed.  “Like I said, I don’t think I could handle the commute.  I hate highways at rush hour.”

            She returned her attention to the jewelry on the table, in the hopes that would end the conversation.  She was soon struck by a tiny charm in the shape of an orange, decorated with an opal cut in the shape of a heart.  Picking it up, Elizabeth was surprised by the texture and shape of it; it was very unlike anything Opal usually made.

            “How did you make this?” she asked, staring at it in disbelief.  Opal was a genius with a soldering iron, but this was totally different.

            “Oh, Aurora’s been teaching me sculpting,” Opal told her.  “Made that with precious metal clay.  I’m pretty proud of it, actually.”

            “You should be,” Elizabeth assured her.  “It’s wonderful.”  Despite herself, she couldn’t help adding “This would make the perfect necklace for Yuzu.”

            Crystal let out a disgusted groan, but Opal laughed.  “Good thing you’re not a mother,” she commented.  “You’d be raising one hell of a spoiled brat if you were.”

            Elizabeth wanted to defend herself.  But all she could do was laugh nervously.

            “Tell you what, since it’s for your girl, I’ll give you a discount price on it,” Opal said.  “At cost.”

            “I couldn’t do that,” Elizabeth exclaimed.

            But Opal was insisting, and Crystal wouldn’t back Elizabeth up, even though it seemed plain to Elizabeth that she didn’t want to see their work sold just at the price of the materials.  It didn’t take Opal long to wear down Elizabeth’s resistance, and soon she was pulling out the few bills from her wallet.

            So much for being able to eat in the coming week.

            But Elizabeth couldn’t manage to feel too down about it as she returned to her car.  She hadn’t actually helped out their cause much, but she’d gotten two really great purchases.  And getting Yuzu a new necklace helped her feel less guilty about giving up on that dress online.

            When she got home, Elizabeth fished out a tiny chain from her accessories box, and put the orange charm on it.  “Here, look what I got you!” she said, dangling it in front of Yuzu’s face before putting it around the doll’s neck.

            The golden orange and its creamy, fiery opal complimented Yuzu’s sadly yellowed resin beautifully, but clashed terribly with the medieval-style, rust-colored dress she was currently wearing.  Scowling, Elizabeth opened her drawer of dolly clothes and picked out something a bit more modern to take the dress’s place.  Yuzu had been wearing it for a couple of weeks anyway; it was already high time for a change of clothes.  And a change of wig; the green waves fit the green trim on the dress, but didn’t work with the jeans and T-shirt Elizabeth picked out to be Yuzu’s new outfit.  A pretty brown wig, straight and shoulder-length, made a fitting cap to the outfit.

            Feeling pleased with the new look, Elizabeth used her phone to snap a picture of Yuzu, tagging it #MSD and #Yuzu as she uploaded it to her Instagram.

            Then she sat down at the kitchen table and unwrapped her ‘new’ book.  Casually flipping through the pages to check out the typeface—something she should have done before paying $100 for it!—Elizabeth was surprised to discover an envelope had been lodged in between two of the pages of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_.

            The envelope was addressed to a Mr. Sebastian Melmoth, at a Paris address, but the postage was American.  The ink on the cancellation wasn’t evenly applied—it never was, in her experience—but it seemed to say that the letter had been mailed the thirtieth of November, 1900.

            Curiously, Elizabeth slid the letter inside out of the envelope and started to read it.

 

***

 

Detroit, Michigan

November the 30th, 1900

 

Cousin Oscar,

            I must confess myself worried about you.  Little news trickles to America of your condition these days.  In fact, the last word I had was a brief note sent to a mutual acquaintance by your devoted Robbie, and even that was only shared with me to the extent that it concerned your health.

            Will you find me dreadfully Gothic if I admit that I felt compelled to write to you because of a dream?  It was a silly thing, as dreams go; bodiless, I witnessed you searching through a pitiful shamble of a Paris lodging house, far more disgraceful a lodging for you than even my own dwelling would be.  As you hurled about shredded silk fineries and sent sheafs of paper flitting through the air, you were crying out in regret because you couldn’t find that beautiful emerald pin you’ve always prized so highly.

            In truth, the dream left me so shaken that I rose from my bed, though I can’t see why it would worry me so.  I thought I would simply leave myself a quick note to write you in the morning and then return to my bed before my wife could waken.  My intention was merely to enquire after your well-being, and laugh about my foolish dream, with perhaps the subtle inquiry that you hadn’t given that precious pin away to Bosie.

            But I saw a light coming in at the sash that didn’t seem to be the moon.  Stepping out of the chamber, I went to the hall window and peered up at the night sky.  What I saw there was so surprising that I am astonished my cry of alarm did not wake my family.

            I had to go outside to confirm what I had seen.  Hovering in the sky above my home was a circular object not dissimilar to a bed warmer, glowing from within not with the warm orange glow of hot coals but with an unnatural light, such as can only be produced electrically.  As if it had been waiting for me, the thing flew off as soon as I was fully outside, headed eastward.

            I could not shake the notion, my dear brother, that it was headed to Paris.  That it was on its way specifically to you.

            Thus I sit here by the wan light of a solitary candle to write to you before the dawn can break.  I fear this celestial omen bodes ill for your already frail health.  Please do send me a telegram promptly to let me know nothing untoward has happened to you.

            Better still, please come to America yourself.  People here are not so unforgiving as they are in Europe.  Ask Robbie sometime if you will not accept my word on the subject.  Perhaps you would have no better time blending back into Society than you have had there, but there are a great many of us here who are not Society who would welcome you with open arms.  Did you not make dozens of friends all across this country when you were here before?  (Is that not, after all, when you and I finally met in the flesh?)

            I know your health has been poorly since your release.  In all honesty, mine is none too excellent, either, and my finances are not so much better than yours as I would like.  But there are many different climates in this great country, Oscar, as I’m sure you remember quite well.  Whatever ails you, there is air somewhere here that will alleviate it.  If Michigan disagrees with you, we can travel westward.  The dry desert air of Arizona or New Mexico is said to do wonders for countless conditions, and California is reputed to be paradise on Earth.

            Please, send word that you will come back to America.  You could make a new start here.  I have just enough money that I could support one more, at least for a little while.  I cannot bear the thought of you lying ill in some dingy Parisian guesthouse, unable to enjoy the fine life you loved so much.

 

Yours Most Truly,

Daniel Wilde

 

***

 

            Elizabeth read the letter, pondered it, checked the envelope, and read it again.  The letter was definitely to Oscar Wilde.  There was no question of that.  The man writing it addressed him first as “cousin” and then as “brother”, called him “Oscar” twice, and the author’s own name was Wilde.  The envelope, however, was addressed to someone else entirely, even though the address was written in the same handwriting.  The paper matched, though, in size, type of paper, and the aging it had suffered in the 117 years since it was written.  So who was Sebastian Melmoth?  One of Oscar Wilde’s friends?  Perhaps this Daniel Wilde hadn’t known his address, but had known his friend’s.

            There were so many more questions, though!  Why hadn’t Oscar Wilde left Paris for America?  Elizabeth couldn’t remember exactly when he died, but she thought it was around 1904, plenty of time to have picked up and left, though she knew for a fact that he had remained in Paris until his death.  Who was Daniel Wilde, and what was his connection to Oscar?  Why hadn’t he realized that he’d only dreamed up that UFO?  (He’d have had to wake up afterwards to be able to write about it, after all!)

            Maybe it was a forgery.  Someone’s cute idea of a hoax.

            It was in excellent condition, much too good for a letter from 1900.  No, that wasn’t entirely true.  For a letter that had been hidden away in a book for a century, having only been removed from its envelope and read once, its condition was not surprising at all.

            But the fact was that it described a UFO.  Admittedly, in amusingly archaic terminology, but that didn’t change the facts.  Until someone came up with the idea of space travel, no one ever reported seeing flying saucers, no matter what those “Ancient Aliens” types liked to believe.  And the idea of little green men from Mars…

            …actually, the idea of Martians started in the Victorian era with the discovery of the Martian ‘canals,’ didn’t it?

            Did that mean it was actually possible that someone in 1900 could have claimed he’d seen a UFO?  If he’d been keeping up with scientific discoveries—and actually, there had been some speculative fiction in the 1890s, Elizabeth was pretty sure—then it was easily possible that the idea of a ship from outer space could have been floating around in his subconscious.  But it just seemed so bizarre!

            Well, there was only one thing to do, wasn’t there?

            Whenever logical deduction failed, it was time to turn to the Internet.  There might be some accurate information in among the gobbledygook.

            Might as well start at the beginning, she decided as she turned on her laptop.  See if this Daniel Wilde was a famous lunatic or something.  So she typed “Daniel Wilde” in the search engine.

            That, of course, was the wrong thing to do.

            The results pages were capped with ads saying “We found Daniel Wilde!  Addresses, phone numbers, email!” and “Looking for someone?  Arrest records, probate court, police records and more!” while the ‘actual hits’ were things like “Daniel Wilder’s Facebook” and “Daniela Wilde’s LinkedIn Profile.”  Right.  Of course she hadn’t found shit.  What was she expecting?

            This time, she went to Wikipedia.  There wouldn’t necessarily be anything, but there _might_ be.  And at least she wouldn’t get ads trying to sell the personal information of modern people.  Just to be sure she was less likely to get false hits, Elizabeth searched for “Sebastian Melmoth” this time; an unusual name like Melmoth would definitely pop up less frequently.

            To her surprise, she wasn’t given a list of possible matches.  She was just taken right to the site’s biography of Oscar Wilde, straight to the section on his life after release from prison.  It turned out he had adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth in order to keep a low profile.  Well, that started to make sense, then.

            But she had been wrong about when he died.  It hadn’t been 1904.  He had died on November 30th, 1900.

            Then, if the letter was genuine, that Daniel guy had dreamed about him on the very morning of his death?  It sounded too ridiculous to be real, but history was filled with similar stories, of people who dreamed of their friends and loved ones just as they were passing from this world.

            But she’d always taken those accounts as fanciful.  Things like that didn’t happen in reality.  So this probably _was_ an elaborate prank.

            Maybe that was why the man had sold it to her so cheaply.  Maybe the whole _book_ was a giant prank.  Some ‘friend’ of his had it printed up, antiqued a new leather binding, and then used old paper—there were lots of places online you could buy genuine Victorian or Edwardian envelopes and stationery that had never been used—to write up the letter.  Given how very _legible_ the letter was, that seemed highly probable.  In Elizabeth’s experience, real letters from the late 19th and early 20th centuries were entirely illegible.  Especially when she was expected to transcribe them.

            For that matter, maybe the man had made the book himself.  Maybe this was _his_ prank.  Though he hadn’t really looked the type.

            Still, Elizabeth dug out her phone and checked the texted receipt for the name of his store.  Going back out to the search engine, she typed in “J F Books.”  If this was his prank, then his business would be listed as bookbinding, or maybe vintage book repair.

            All the hits were false hits.  She tried “JF Books” and then “JFBooks” but neither produced any genuine results.

            That only left her more confused than before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case anyone's curious, Yuzu is based on one of my own dolls. (Unlike Elizabeth, I'm not living hand-to-mouth, so I have more than one doll. Way, way more than one. Like, it's almost a sickness. Uh...sorry, not relevant.) You can find a picture of the real Yuzu in her rust-colored Medieval-style dress and green wig here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/qe3KWkv3FFBRTLAq1 And, while I'm at it, all my Yuzu photos are in this album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/b8PTAyDh4sguP2Lw2 (There aren't all that many, though, because my Yuzu is really badly strung, and doesn't hold a position worth shit, making it really frustrating trying to take her picture.)
> 
> Those ads that attacked her search results (and the type of results she got in general) are absolutely real. I was trying to investigate the connection between a sailor whose citizenship certificate I found in the collection and the family our museum is dedicated to, and when I searched for his name, I kept getting results like that. Even though the paper was from 1812. Even when I added 1812 to the search, the results were the same. It really sucked. :( Why are search engines exclusively designed to try to sell you things?


	3. Chapter 3

            The letter kept eating at her, but Elizabeth was determined to ignore it.  She didn’t want to give in to someone’s silly prank.  Whether it was that tall, mysterious man who sold it to her or not, _someone_ was having a game, and she didn’t want to be their dupe.

            So she spent Sunday buried in a video game, and as soon as the week started, she was up to her ears in work, which was always nicely distracting.  But she had started reading the book now, and every touch of that soft, smooth leather against her fingertips reminded her of the letter now sitting on her shelf, making her wonder what the full story was.

            If it _was_ a prank, then whose, and why?  No one just randomly forged a letter to a long-dead playwright without some kind of motive.  Normally, forgeries of this sort were attempts to gain money, but that obviously wasn’t the case here, unless the forgery was years ago and the attempt had already failed.  It could also be a prank pulled on a specific person, but if so, on whom?  What had happened when the prank was played?

            And was the book genuine, or was it a forgery, too?

            No, no, it _had_ to be a forgery.  No one would have sold it for only $100 if it was genuine.  Of course, if it was a forgery, then she had been horribly ripped off…

            …which is why she was trying not to think about it.

            But Thursday turned out to be a remarkably slow day at work, and by mid-afternoon her slate of incoming donations had been cleared, and she had nothing to do.  Admittedly, she could have gone to the archives and gotten some of the old microfiche news articles and continued the ongoing, onerous task of properly digitizing them, but…she was _not_ paid enough to do that without being told to.  Especially not when all those articles were about the early career of a shithead like Reynolds.

            Instead, she logged into her corporate account at Ancestors.com.  Elizabeth knew it was a bad idea to do personal research on company time, but she was pretty sure the computer only logged the sites she went to, not what she researched on them.  And Ancestors.com was an approved site for research.  It was necessary, after all, when trying to research some of the more remote parts of the Reynolds family tree.

            Entering the name “Daniel Wilde” into the in-site search engine produced more than a dozen hits, most of them in entirely the wrong time, place or both.  The seventh one on the list looked most promising:  it said “Daniel Wilde, deceased, 1916, Saint Ignace, Michigan.”  The man didn’t have a personal entry, just a spot on a family tree.  According to the tree, he was born in County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1852, as Daniel Shaughnessy.  He moved to America in 1878, at which time he changed his name to Daniel Wilde.

            So the sender of the phony letter was a real person, one who had taken the name Wilde in order to pretend he was related to Oscar Wilde?  Elizabeth scowled, shaking her head.  That couldn’t be it.  Oscar Wilde wasn’t famous in 1878, or if he was, it wasn’t by much.  Certainly not enough that anyone would be expecting a free ride by claiming relation to him.

            Just as she was trying to decide if she should write it all off as an insoluble mystery, she noticed there was a footnote on the name change notation.  Clicking on it led to the message that “Grandmother always told us that Daniel insisted his father was actually William Wilde, the surgeon.”  The user who left the note was listed as A. Wilde, and there was a little star beside the name to indicate that it had been verified as the user’s real name.

            Okaaaay….so who the heck was William Wilde?

            Even though it was a little risky, Elizabeth opened Wikipedia in a new tab, and entered “William Wilde” in the search bar, expecting another session of sifting through unrelated results.  Instead, she was taken directly to a biographical page:

> **Sir William Robert Wills Wilde** MD, FRCSI, (March 1815 – 19 April 1876) was an Irish eye and ear surgeon, as well as an author of significant works on medicine, archaeology and folklore, particularly concerning his native Ireland. He was the father of Oscar Wilde.

            Well, that answered a lot of questions!  Potentially answered them, anyway.  At least now Elizabeth had some idea why he the letter writer had Daniel address Oscar Wilde as “my dear brother.”  Seemed a little odd to open the letter with “Cousin Oscar,” but maybe it was a Shakespearean affectation, like Claudius speaking of “cousin Hamlet.”  Looking for confirmation—or more likely denial—that William Wilde had a bastard named Daniel, she clicked on the link to go to the “Marriage and children” subsection of the page.

> Wilde married the poet Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee in 1851, who wrote and published under the name of Speranza. The couple had two sons: Willie and Oscar, and a daughter, Isola Francesca, who died in childhood. In addition to his children with his wife, Sir William Wilde was the father of three children born out of wedlock before his marriage: Henry Wilson, born in 1838, and Emily and Mary Wilde, born in 1847 and 1849, respectively, of different parentage to Henry. Sir William acknowledged paternity of his illegitimate children and provided for their education, but they were reared by his relatives rather than with his wife and legitimate children.[6] According to George Bernard Shaw, when he first met the Wilde family, William Wilde “was currently reported to have a family in every farmhouse; and the wonder was that Lady Wilde didn’t mind.” [7]

            Hmm.  So it wasn’t actually impossible, then.  At least, that this Daniel Wilde was Oscar Wilde’s half-brother wasn’t impossible.  It _was_ impossible, surely, that the letter came from him.  It was just a modern forgery.  It _had_ to be.

            But why?  Who would benefit from forging a letter by such an obscure individual?  Well, the forger, of course.  But who was he, and how was he expecting to benefit from this letter?  He had to either be a descendant of Daniel Wilde, or he planned to sell the letter _to_ a descendant of Daniel Wilde.  But it was such a crazy letter!  Who’d pay money for something so ludicrous?  Maybe the forger had wanted to sell the letter to one of those pseudo-history shows that tried to prove aliens had been visiting the planet for centuries.  That made at least a modicum of sense.

            If that was the case, the forger would have to be one of Daniel Wilde’s descendants.  Not so much because it would be hard to make up an excuse for them to have the letter—anyone could find an old letter forgotten inside a book, just as Elizabeth had—but because they wouldn’t have known Daniel Wilde _existed_ unless he was part of their family tree.

            Returning to the Ancestors.com tab, Elizabeth scrolled down, looking for living descendants.  According to the chart, he had one living grandson—Curtis Charles Wilde, b. 1946—five living great-grandchildren—Andrew, Alice, Thomas, Michael and Lola—and a whopping twelve living great-great-grandchildren, not to mention eight triple-greats.  This was going to be a nightmare, though admittedly the youngest generation was probably _too_ young to have been responsible for such a cleverly thought out prank.  While Andrew and Alice seemed the most likely suspects—the person who had been updating Ancestors.com had an “A” name, after all—there was something so old-fashioned about the whole thing that Elizabeth couldn’t help but suspect the one living descendant from her parents’ generation.

            Surprisingly, clicking on his name brought up a personal page, complete with a photograph of a man in his late twenties, wearing only silver lamé pants and a dog collar, flailing around on a stage, microphone in hand, with long blond hair fanning out around his head.  Like any Ancestors.com biography, it was woefully short, but it told Elizabeth enough.  This Curtis had dropped the “e” from his last name when he became a professional singer, having briefly been on top of the rock industry in the mid-1970s.

            Feeling a long and decidedly inappropriate Wikipedia cross-linking binge coming on, Elizabeth wisely shut her browser and got back to work.

            But she made a mental note to look up “Curt Wild” when she got home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I have no idea how Ancestry.com works. That was the other reason I made up an analog for it.
> 
> Regarding William Wilde's Wikipedia entry, all of it is directly quoted from the real Wikipedia article, except the last sentence. The George Bernard Shaw quote is genuine, though: it's from a letter he wrote to an early Oscar Wilde biographer (a letter which my copy of the complete works of Oscar Wilde used as an introduction).
> 
> Oh, and now seems as good a time as any to explain that one of the other motives I had in writing this was to provide a fic that tried to play around with the typo in the movie's end credits (in which Curt's last name had an "e" on the end when he was a teenager) in order to make him related to Oscar Wilde.


	4. Chapter 4

            The best way to keep from getting too drawn in by intense research was to have plenty of distractions on hand.  As her laptop was booting up, Elizabeth turned on the Blu-ray of one of her favorite movies, then brought Yuzu over to the table, setting the doll to kneeling beside the laptop, with her own 1/4 scale laptop in her hands.

            After taking another picture—her phone’s memory was really getting badly cluttered with pictures of Yuzu—Elizabeth opened the browser on her computer, and headed to Wikipedia.  Searching for “Curt Wild” took her directly to the page with his biography.

 

***

 

**Curt Wild** (born Curtis Charles Wilde; June 3, 1946[1]) is an American singer and songwriter, now retired.  In the two decades of his career, he released 8 albums, of which two went gold.  Though only three of his songs ever made the Top 10 lists, more than a dozen of his songs are routinely hailed as among the best and/or the most important tracks of music to come out of the 1970s.[2]

 

Despite rock legends to the contrary, Wild was raised in a trailer park in Upper Michigan, where he was routinely physically, mentally and sexually abused by his family.[3]  According to one mid-1980s biographer, Wild first learned to play guitar in his early teens, having paid for the lessons by granting sexual favors to the man who provided both the guitar and the lessons.[4]  Wild left his family’s trailer while he was still a teenager, moving alone to Detroit, where he formed a garage band initially called the Rats.  Their debut album was released in 1970, to mixed results.  His second album, the following year, had better commercial success, but was not critically acclaimed.  His two collaborative albums—the first with his then-lover Brian Slade and the second with Jack Fairy—in the mid-1970s were the peak of his career, critically and commercially.

 

He received only one Grammy Award, though he was nominated on no less than five occasions.  He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, at the same time as his former collaborators Brian Slade and Jack Fairy, though none of the artists put in an appearance at the ceremony.[5]

 

Wild is an infamous figure in the rock and roll history of the 1970s.  Though he never made any formal announcements regarding his sexuality, he was first brought to the world’s attention when he became the lover of British singer Brian Slade in 1972.[6]  The relationship with Slade is the only known serious relationship Wild has entered into, leading many to conclude that he is a homosexual, though this has never been confirmed.[7]  Like many other rock musicians of his era, Wild had a passion for illegal narcotics, having often arrived at concerts under the influence of such drugs as heroin and cocaine, and many of his songs are believed to have been about drug use, with the rest being interpreted as having been inspired by his homosexual proclivities.  Wild was briefly arrested for possession of several narcotic substances in 1979, but was let off with rehab and community service in the form of an unpaid benefit tour, with all revenues donated to charities intended to assist young people in freeing themselves from the chains of substance addiction.[8]

 

**Early Life**

 

Little is known with certainty about Curt Wild’s childhood.  Rock and roll legend liked to claim that he had been raised—or even bred—by wolves, a myth that the singer encouraged.[9]  No interviewer ever got a straight answer from Wild regarding his life before he moved to Detroit, and if he shared the information with his band or other friends, none were willing to admit the truth.  Therefore, most of what is known comes from legal and medical records, necessarily leaving large gaps in the story.

 

That he was born in a hospital in Lupus, Michigan, on the 3rd of June in 1946 is a certainty.  His family’s place of residence, a trailer park some five miles outside the town, can be verified only by US Census records, as Lupus was destroyed during the war.  Medical records on file with the American Psychiatric Association reveal that in 1960 Wild began an 18-month electroshock treatment for what his doctor referred to as “feminizing sexual tendencies.”[10]

 

Following the end of the electroshock treatment, there are no further records until 1969, when Curt Wild and the Rats entered a “battle of the bands” contest on the outskirts of Detroit.[11]

 

**Music and Career**

 

Curt Wild’s oeuvre operates on a plane more visceral than musical.  Though capable of singing quite tenderly, many of his songs are more shouted than sung, and the difference between performances of the same song from one recording to the next are mind-numbing.  His inability to record the same song identically in different recording sessions has often been attributed to his crippling drug problem.[12]  In live performances, Wild usually reacted strongly to the audience, flipping them off if they heckled him, and sometimes even exposing himself on stage.[13]

 

Though his violent temper and drug addiction prevented him from having steady managerial representation, Wild’s band stuck with him from 1969 all the way to his final record in 1987, undergoing half a dozen name changes in that time.  Initially, all of them—Wild included—were simply billed as “The Rats.”[14]  At the height of Wild’s career, this had changed to “Wylde Rattz”, and by his final album the band’s name had returned to “Curt Wild and the Rats.”[15]  Even during the “Wylde Rattz” period, Wild referred to them just as “the Rats,” both in interviews and in his few surviving letters from the period.[citation needed]

 

Many of Wild’s fans were attracted by the singer’s rebellious charisma and good looks, rather than by his music.[citation needed]  Wild traditionally performed in leather pants, shirtless, sometimes going out on stage oiled down to produce a sweat-like sheen.  In the early portion of the 1970s, he wore heavy black eyeliner, and even into the 1980s he always performed with his nails painted black.[16]  In his earliest career, Wild’s hair was short, and his natural shade of brown, but as the 1970s progressed, his hair became longer and longer, and in the mid-1970s it was usually bleached a pale blond.  The long hair combined with his extremely energetic performance style made his concerts visually striking, despite that he did not usually employ any pyrotechnics or other elaborate stagecraft.

 

In 1972, England’s dandy of pop, Brian Slade, made his first world tour, and New York was Slade’s first American port of call.  Wild joined the tour immediately; by the time the tour left America, they were already rumored to be lovers, despite that Slade was a married man.  They were nearly inseparable for the rest of 1972 and all of 1973, making countless public appearances, and staging several sexually charged stunts during Slade’s concerts, to the delight of their fans and the consternation of everyone else.[17]  Their relationship was so very staged, in fact, that their apologists are now convinced that it was entirely a fabrication.  Despite several publically performed kisses, there is no hard proof of any romantic or sexual relation in private; according to Wild’s loudest apologist, “the very artificial, very public sexuality of the rock stars was transformed by the very private, unknown sexuality of the consumers.  Their fans—whether gay or bisexual—wanted to believe their idols were the same as they were, and this desire of theirs was so potent that it became accepted as fact.”[18]  Whether the relationship between Slade and Wild was personal or purely professional, it ended in January of 1974 in a bitter row that had Wild leaving England for Germany.

 

While in Germany, Wild recorded his second collaborative album, this one with another English dandy, Jack Fairy.  The Berlin album is generally regarded as Wild’s finest work.[19]  Wild and Fairy went on a world tour together, but Wild’s new manager did not attempt to spin them as a couple, as his previous manager (also Slade’s manager) had done.[20]  Following that tour, Wild’s career began to sink as drugs took over his life again.

 

During his 1979 benefit tour, Wild swore that he had learned his lesson, and that this time he was done with drugs for good.  According to his band, Wild had spent most of the 1970s battling his heroin addiction, and his only limited successes in that battle had come from his partnerships with Slade and Fairy.[21]  Though there is no solid evidence that Wild did manage to beat his drug habit, his public appearances in the 1980s were more lucid than the ones in the 1970s, and he was never again arrested for drug-related offenses, so his fans like to believe that he did succeed in breaking his addiction.[citation needed]

 

His final album, released in 1987, contained three tender love ballads, despite that Wild’s music usually veered towards the angry side of rock.  “Maxwell,” a beautiful melody with tragic lyrics, was the first cut on the album; “Make a Wish,” an unaccountably cheerful song from the usually moody Wild, was the first cut on the B side of the album; “Beloved,” a haunting song with lyrics that could be interpreted as hopeful or suicidally depressed, was the final song of the album.  All three songs are unquestionably about men, encouraging the belief that Wild is, in fact, homosexual.[22]

 

**Post-career Life**

 

In 1989, Curt Wild forced his way on stage during the award ceremony for the Grammies, and punched five-time Grammy winner Tommy Stone in the face on live television.  Wild was screaming incoherently the entire time, but blood work done following his arrest showed no trace of narcotic substances, and he was well below the legal limit for alcohol.[23]  In a statement to the press while he was still in jail awaiting trial, Wild claimed he had been outraged by Stone’s performance at President Reynolds’ third inauguration.[24]  Despite the protests of Wild’s lawyers, Tommy Stone paid a private visit to Wild in the lock-up, after which Stone insisted that all charges against Wild be dropped.[25]  Neither singer ever made a statement regarding what happened in that private meeting, and there are entire websites dedicated to fan theories, though they frequently devolve to pathetic sexual fantasies.[26]

 

Following Wild’s release, he made no more public appearances, and when his passport expired in 2003 it was not renewed.[27]  The Internal Revenue Service has not been willing to release Wild’s tax information—not even to make a statement regarding whether or not he is still sending in tax returns—and there have been no reported sightings of Wild in New York City, where he had been residing from 1970 onwards.

 

This has led to many theories, of which only three are plausible.  One, that he returned to the trailer park from whence he sprang.  Two, that he is now deceased, possibly having died along with his hometown, though drug overdose and suicide are also popular contenders for cause of death.  Three, that he left the country, though this theory’s plausibility is damaged by the fact that his passport has been expired for more than a decade.

 

***

 

            In reading the Wikipedia article, Elizabeth found herself distracted by some of the photographs, particularly the one labeled “Gay Stunt on Stage,” which showed Curt Wild playing his guitar while another man knelt in front of him with his face to the strings.  She wasn’t sure if the other man was supposed to be playing the guitar with his mouth, or if he was pretending to suck him off _through_ the guitar.  It was strangely hypnotic, whatever it was.

            The large variety of links at the bottom of the article was too tempting to pass up, and Elizabeth clicked on one that promised an analysis of Wild’s musical oeuvre, in the expectation that it would be filled with video clips—or at least imbedded .mp3s—to give concrete examples.  To her dismay, she found a lengthy, analytical blog post relying deeply on heavy musical terminology.  Not that she got far enough to get a really good idea of it.  She got lost early on, in the five paragraphs trying to assess when he decided to use different types of guitars in his music, and why.

            What was the difference between an acoustic guitar and an electric one?

            Weren’t guitars all, well, guitars?

            And how could anyone take all this shit so seriously?!  It was just music.

            “I don’t get people at all,” Elizabeth sighed, reaching over to adjust Yuzu’s wig.

            There wasn’t any point in pursuing this line of inquiry, interesting as some of it might have been.  This Curt Wild guy didn’t seem a likely candidate to have forged that letter.  His boyfriend—ex-boyfriend—was the one who sounded like a successor to Oscar Wilde, so providing some proof of a blood relationship surely had no appeal.  Not to mention that if he wanted the public to make that connection, he wouldn’t have dropped the ‘e’ in the first place, surely.  Now, maybe that boyfriend could have been behind it.  Maybe it excited him that his lover was the grand-nephew of Oscar Wilde, and maybe he’d had the letter forged to use to tell the world about it, only they’d broken up before he could use it.  But…no, that didn’t really seem likely.  It was too pointless and petty and indirect for a rock star, especially one willing to go so far as to stick his face in another man’s guitar on stage.

            There just didn’t seem to be any reason for anyone to have forged that letter.

            And yet they had.

            Hadn’t they?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the few scenes in the screenplay that didn't make the final movie showed the wolves bringing baby Curt to the trailer park, rather than the movie's implication that the legend was that he'd been raised by them.
> 
> I must offer the universe (and "Velvet Goldmine" writer/director Todd Haynes) my deepest and most profound apologies for the "quote" from the "apologist" in that Wikipedia entry. I loved the phrasing so much, and it felt like the kind of thing that this dystopian world would claim for its own and distort. Anyway, the line I was massacring came from the introduction to the screenplay, when Haynes was talking about Arthur's scenes during "Baby's On Fire": "There's something palpable about intercutting the public sexuality of the rock stars with the very private, unknown sexuality of the consumer, and how one directly affects the other."


	5. Chapter 5

            Saturday proved much hotter than the previous weekend—though at a high of 101° it was still below average for July 1st—and it was the type of day that Elizabeth typically spent hiding inside underneath a whirring ceiling fan.  But every time she glanced at the book lying on her bedside table, or the letter on the mantelpiece, she was filled with an annoying urge to start searching the Internet for more information.

            To fight that urge, she decided to go out somewhere physically.  The malls would be too crowded, so as she pulled out onto the street, she turned towards Maplewood.  The shopping district should be able to distract her, surely.  And even if not, at least she could get something nice to eat for lunch.

            Predictably enough, the parking lots behind the stores were all jammed full of cars.  Elizabeth had to spend long enough circling them looking for a parking place that she was starting to get just a little pissed off long before she could find any place to park.  Still, at least she got a good chuckle looking at the other cars circling with her.  SUVs and extended cab pick-ups.  They probably burned as much gas just looking for parking as her whole tank held.

            When she finally did get parked, Elizabeth hadn’t even finished getting out of her car when one of those extended-cab pick-ups—raised up to look even more stupid—stopped, blaring on its horn as the driver leaned out the window.  “Fucking bitch!” he shouted at her.  “Get a real car, tree-hugger!”

            Elizabeth gave him a tight smile.  “Enjoy running out of gas, piggy-pig.  Driving a ludicrous thing like that won’t make anyone think you’ve got a dick in those pants of yours,” she said…

            …or wished she had the courage to say.

            Instead, she just shook her head and walked off as the driver kept cursing at her.  She was miserably used to it; the hazards of driving a hybrid car and all.  Halfway out of the parking lot, Elizabeth heard a revving motor behind her.  She turned just in time to jump in between two parked SUVs, diving out of the way of the pick-up, which was bearing down on her at dangerous speeds.  The pick-up driver leaned on his horn again, shaking a fist at her out his window as he sped away again.

            Elizabeth peeked her cell phone out of her hiding place, trying to take a photo of his license plate so she could report him.  Unfortunately, the only thing legible in the photo was his bumper sticker.  In between the two 9s of 1995 was written “Never Forget – Or Forgive!”

            “Fucking son of a bitch!” she grumbled, deleting the photo.  Seriously, it was more than twenty fucking years ago!  On top of that, the man had been the tyrant who plunged the United States of America into the miserable state it was in now.  Everyone should have been _grateful_ that Reynolds had been shot!

            That had certainly been Elizabeth’s feeling when she heard the news.  Like anyone else in her generation, she could remember quite clearly where she’d been that day.  Latin class, reading the _Aeneid_.  The assassination had been announced over the university’s PA system, leaving the classroom silent in disbelief after the announcement ended.

            All Elizabeth had been able to feel, after it began to sink in, was a relief that the man was finally gone.  That maybe democracy would be able to return.  Her professor had possessed a better understanding of what the future held:  at the next class meeting, while Washington was still in shocked mourning and the country still under martial law, he had brought in a photocopied packet of materials for them to translate in class for the next week or so.  Classical texts about the assassination of Julius Caesar, about the civil war that ensued, and how it opened the door for Octavian to become Augustus Caesar, creating centuries of tyranny under the Roman Empire.

            Well, at least this time there hadn’t been _civil_ war…

            By the time she finished stewing, her feet had taken her on autopilot all the way into the Book House.  Well, why not?  It would be a good place to start.

            Out of curiosity, Elizabeth made her way over to the Classics/Literature section.  Maybe they’d have another complete works of Oscar Wilde so she could compare the table of contents.  For that matter, maybe there was one with interior pages that matched the—

            No!  She was not supposed to be thinking about that book!

            Hastily, Elizabeth forced herself to leave that section, headed for the history section in the opposite corner of the store.  Halfway there, though, she stopped to look at some of the fancy vintage books in the glass cases.  Most of them didn’t have gilt scrollwork…and far more of them were bound in cloth than in leather.

            Ah, but there was one in leather with some faded and damaged gilt scrollwork!  Curiously, Elizabeth took it out of the case.  It was dated 1887, and it was a novel she’d never heard of before, by an obscure author.  A quick search on her phone told her that the author was _so_ obscure that they didn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

            So it was a book no one remembered, badly damaged inside and out…and it was about the same price as what she had paid that man in the Grove.  Elizabeth wasn’t quite sure how to interpret that.

            “Hey, there you are!”  The voice called out so close to Elizabeth’s ear that for a moment she actually thought the speaker was talking to her.  But the young man was actually talking to another young man not far from her.  “Find anything?”

            “Not so far,” the second young man replied.  “You?”

            The first one laughed, and showed him a book.  “Check this out; I found it downstairs.”  Elizabeth had a good view of the book even with a surreptitious glance.  It was titled _Aliens of the Ancient World – in Myth and Reality_.

            “Fuckin’ sweet!”  the second man exclaimed, taking the book from him and flipping through it.  “Aw, this is shit,” he moaned almost immediately.  “They’re leaving out all the good stuff!”

            “Yeah, I know, but you gotta start small if you wanna convert the unbelievers.  This should win over my folks, right?”

            The second man shook his head.  “Look at the back—it’s just the print version of a website!  You’re better off saving your money and just showing them the website.”

            The first man was silent a minute, then nodded.  “You might be right about that.  Okay, lemme take this book back downstairs.”

            “Why bother?  There’s a couple of chairs over there; just ditch it in one of them and then we can go.  I’m starving.”

            The first man agreed to that, and soon was depositing the book in the reading chair, before both men drifted off in the direction of the door.  Elizabeth tried to concentrate on her own affairs.  Though it was difficult to get their conversation out of her head.  She’d been so focused on the people that it had been a while since she last stopped to think about the content of the letter.

            If it _wasn’t_ a forgery, then surely someone else would have seen that UFO.  Detroit wasn’t as big in 1900 as it was now, but it was still big enough that _someone_ other than Daniel Wilde must have seen the UFO.  If there was a UFO to see, that is.

            But it wasn’t that she was actually interested in the UFO, or in looking for proof that the letter was genuine, she told herself as she picked up the book out of the chair.  She just wanted to clean up after those jerks who had left it in the wrong place.  If she happened to read the back and see the name and URL of the associated website while she was at it, that was just a coincidence, of course.

            After buying a biography of Oscar Wilde, a pictorial history of the 1970s, and a few interesting-looking novels, Elizabeth headed out to get lunch.  While she was waiting for her food, she got out her phone and typed in the URL off the back off the book.  She found it to be an encyclopedic site, with a rather foolish design scheme of white text on a starry sky background.  According to its “About” page, it was all maintained by one man, because wiki sites were too unreliable, and it only cataloged “reliable” UFO sightings, ones that were reported in personal letters, news media, and histories, rather than listing alien or UFO-like ancient art and calling it a sighting.

            Well, at least it had _some_ standards.  And it would pass the time until her food was delivered.

            Elizabeth used the site’s search engine to look for sightings in 1900.  To her surprise, it gave two:  one in Detroit and one in Paris, both on November 30th.

            No.  No way.  No way that letter was on the level.

            She selected the Detroit sighting, and was taken to a page that started out with a lengthy quotation from the _Detroit Daily Register_ from December 1st, 1900.  It described the UFO in considerable detail, using the exact same terminology from the letter, and said that more than a dozen residents had witnessed the spectacle, ranging from a policeman on his watch all the way up to the mayor’s wife, though it specifically said that the best description they had gotten of the lights in the sky had come from the bookseller Daniel Wilde.  An astronomer was consulted, and announced with confidence that the phenomenon was related to that of the Northern Lights, and that it was nothing to be alarmed about, because the atmospheric conditions that had caused it were unlikely to repeat themselves.

            The website scoffed at the astronomer’s explanation—as, really, most people would—and said that the same UFO was sighted in Paris as well, mere hours later _in daylight_.  It was reported in various Paris newspapers with considerably more detail, but despite that most of the city must have seen it, all the papers laughed it off as mass hysteria.  Only one paper was poetic enough to describe it as the city’s sorrow at the passing of the English poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, over whose domicile it hovered for several minutes before departing straight upwards.

            Elizabeth’s food came while she was still reading about the Paris sighting, and she had barely touched her meal when she came to the bottom of the page, which cross-linked to two other UFO sightings that matched this one’s description.  One was over Dublin in 1854, and the other was over London in 1975.

            Shuddering at the idea of a UFO appearing in the year of her birth, Elizabeth selected the 1854 sighting.

            The source for that sighting was a servant of a household in a wealthy district of Dublin, who had seen the flying saucer hovering over the city and then flying off again at great speed.  The site made a big deal of the fact that this sighting was over the neighborhood in which Oscar Wilde had been born, on the day of his birth, and that a matching UFO had shown up over his home on the day he died.  Thankfully, it did not then immediately claim that Oscar Wilde was an alien, but rather made a comparison to Mark Twain and Halley’s Comet.

            As she ate, Elizabeth mulled it over, and decided to risk following the other link and checking out the 1975 sighting.

            “On February 5th, 1975,” the site stated, “a group of popular musicians got together in London to hold a memorial concert not for a performer, but for an entire subgenre of rock, known as ‘glam rock,’ which had been lethally shot one year before in a prank played by its patron saint, Brian Slade.  At roughly four in the morning on Feb. 6th, a traditional UFO was sighted over the club where the concert had been held, its distinctive rosette of lights seemingly focused on the club’s roof.  It was not reported in the newspapers, but an underground magazine did report it, in a quote from a member of a band called the Flaming Creatures.  ‘One of my mates was up on the roof with Curt Wild,’ he said, ‘and he swears blind he saw a flying saucer—like in the movies.  Says it was watching over them.  If you ask me, all he saw was San Pedro.  Poor kid can’t handle his drugs.’  Despite the performer’s skepticism, someone on a rooftop a few streets over also spotted the saucer, and was able to take a Polaroid of the vehicle.  It is one of the few confirmed UFO sightings known.”

            The site had a scan of the Polaroid in question, but it didn’t look like anything to Elizabeth; just a rosette of lights surrounded by blank blackness.

            But what did it mean that one of the individuals on the rooftop was Curt Wild?

            If he really was the grand-nephew of Oscar Wilde, and if Wilde really was visited by a UFO both as he entered and exited the world…what did that mean?

            Did it even mean anything?

            Surely there was such a thing as coincidence in this world…


	6. Chapter 6

            Since there wouldn’t be much point in coming in to work on a Monday when Tuesday was off, the library was closed that day, but Elizabeth wasted most of that free time looking at the book on the ‘70s she had gotten.  There wasn’t really much in it of importance, but it did contain a few photos of Curt Wild.  One was that same one that had seemed so striking on his Wikipedia page, one was a close-up shot of him and Brian Slade just parting from a kiss, and the rest were performance photos, just of him singing into a microphone.

            For someone who had always performed shirtless, he wasn’t in very good shape, it seemed to her.  No defined muscles at all, like the body of a skinny little boy.  A guy with that body shape would never want to go out in public without his shirt on these days.  But maybe standards were different back then.  Most of those photos were, after all, older than Elizabeth was.

 

***

 

            Normally, Elizabeth liked to spend her holidays alone.  Once in a while she might get together with her few friends, but she preferred not to bother.  And she always saw the 4th of July as more a day of mourning for what America used to be than any reason to celebrate.  Opal had invited her to a barbecue and pool party that she called a “celebration of rebellion,” which Elizabeth had planned on at least attending for a little while, so as not to alienate the only really good friend she had.  At least, so she had planned until Darryl Kirkland had informed her that she _would_ be attending the company’s 4th of July ‘picnic’ like all the good little drones.

            CRA’s corporate headquarters was the last place Elizabeth wanted to be on a day off, and yet here she was, trying to be inconspicuous.  She had more important things on her mind than dodging in and out of the different regions of the lobby and courtyard, where suits milled about, pretending getting drunk was the same thing as having fun.  On the drive here, she had decided that it was high time she started looking into the legitimacy of the book rather than the letter.  Why was she here instead of back home at her computer?

            Still, if she could just get through the afternoon without anyone trying to talk to her, she’d be all right.  That wasn’t so hard, wasn’t too much to ask for.

            Only it turned out to be entirely too hard for Elizabeth’s skills.

            She had barely picked up her hot dog when she was cornered by Darryl himself, and half a dozen other people of his generation.  “Ah, so you didn’t forget after all!” Darryl exclaimed as he approached her.  He already reeked of beer.

            “I’m not—”

            “This is little Lizzie Welch,” Darryl told his companions, setting a heavy paw on her shoulder.  “Not a bad gal with a computer, but we always get terrible reviews if she has to talk to the public!”

            “My degrees are in historic preservation, not public relations,” Elizabeth reminded him.  “And I do not go by ‘Lizzie.’”  She had heard enough Lizzie Borden jokes in school to drive any woman mad.

            “I’ve seen you at company parties before,” one of the two women in the group commented, “but you never seem to bring your husband with you.”

            “I’m—I’m not married.”

            “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the other woman sighed.  “Divorce is such a terrible thing.”

            “No, I’ve never, um, never been married.”  Was it really _that_ hard to believe that a woman could hit forty without being married?  Especially one as fat and ugly as she was?

            “Don’t worry, dear,” the first woman said.  “You’re young yet.  You’ll meet the right man soon.”

            “I’m not—”

            “You know, my son Colby is just about your age,” Darryl told her, as he had so many times before, “and he’s still single, if you can believe it!”

            “Your son is more than five years younger than I am, far more immature than his age, with the personal hygiene of a dead skunk, and the personality of a redneck at his first Hitler Youth meeting,” Elizabeth wanted to reply.

            “I don’t think I’m his type,” she squeaked instead, gently sliding away from Darryl’s grip.

            “Don’t be so defeatist!” one of the men laughed.  “Some boys like a woman with some meat on her bones!”

            Fucking asshole.

            “Like a painting by Rubens!” another man added.

            “Shut the fuck up!” Elizabeth screamed in her head.  “Leave me alone, you degenerate old men!”

            “What type of man are you looking for?” one of the women asked.

            “I’m not looking for any type of man,” Elizabeth snapped.  Only when she saw the shocked looks on their faces did she realize she’d said it aloud.  “At my age, I’m really not interested in changing my ways,” she added, but that didn’t seem to make them look any less aghast.  “Um…please excuse me.  I’m not—I’m not feeling well.”

            She ran to the public restroom off the lobby without waiting to see how they reacted.

 

***

 

            Elizabeth had stayed in the bathroom, locked in the corner stall, for at least half an hour.  Only then had she been able to stop panicking long enough to escape the building.  She felt as though everyone was staring at her, but surely they weren’t _really_ staring.

            They were just…

            …fuck, who knew what they were doing?  She hadn’t dared turn in their direction to find out.

            By the time she got home, her nerves had calmed considerably.  Possibly because she had ignored propriety, holiday-appropriateness, and her usual fear of the Committee for Cultural Renewal, and had been blasting the soundtrack to _Project Diva_ all the way home.  Nothing like some perky, synthetic J-Pop to brighten the spirits.

            As her laptop was booting up, Elizabeth used the Google Translate app on her phone to read the copyright information in the front of the book.  “Privately printed in Paris at the request of the mister, in the dawning of the year of 1900.  Bound by misters knight and knight,” was how the app garbled it out.  Well, most of it wasn’t too garbled.  Except that “Mssrs Chevalier et Chevalier” was clearly the name of the publishers, not something that should be translated.

            Unfortunately, that wasn’t a very easily searched name.  It was going to produce all sorts of false hits.  She’d have to be canny about it.

            There were a few sites that sold rare books that she had to monitor for work, in case they had something the library wanted and could afford.  (They never did, naturally.)  Those seemed like an ideal place to start, so she went to each of them in turn and searched for “Chevalier et Chevalier,” as well as “Chevalier & Chevalier” and “Chevalier and Chevalier.”  The first two sites provided nothing, but the third one produced a single hit.

            A seller located in Paris had a Chevalier et Chevalier edition of one of Victor Hugo’s novels for sale.  The style of the binding looked very similar to the Oscar Wilde volume resting beside Elizabeth’s laptop, and the date was quite close as well.  It seemed plausible that they really could have been produced by the same company.

            Rather than trying to run a further search, Elizabeth created a personal account on the site—she had a corporate account, but using that for personal research would be an even worse mistake than what she had said back at the picnic—and used it to compose a message to the seller, explaining that she had recently come across a Chevalier et Chevalier volume of Oscar Wilde, and she was in desperate need of more information, especially as to whether or not it was genuine, as its condition seemed too good to be true.

            After checking and re-checking it four or five times, Elizabeth sent the message.

            Waiting to hear back from him was going to be agony.

 

***

 

            Returning to work on Wednesday was also agony, of a different sort.  Elizabeth had barely gotten settled at her desk before Denver came in, with a sickening smirk on his face.  She tried to find a way to tell him to piss off, but it didn’t work, and nothing left her mouth but some inarticulate whimpers.

            “So,” Denver said, leaning down on the side of her desk, “I hear you’re a dyke.”

            “I’m not.”

            “You told my old man you don’t like men,” Denver reminded her.

            “Yes, but I don’t like women, either.”  Why was that so hard to accept?  People were shit.  Why would she want to let one touch her?

            “Yeah, right,” Denver laughed.  Then he leaned down close to her ear.  “What’re you gonna give me not to spill your secret?”

            “Excuse me?”  Elizabeth pushed her chair away, then turned a disbelieving stare at him.  “Are you trying to blackmail me over a misunderstanding?”  Not to mention that it was a misunderstanding that he had heard from someone more important in the company than he was...

            “Ain’t no misunderstanding.  And I don’t think you understand the position you’re in.  This company’s got defense contracts.”

            “I’m aware of that,” Elizabeth sighed.  “And there’s no rule against being asexual.”

            “Dykes and fags are security risks, everyone knows that.”

            “But I’m not a—”

            “So if I tell them upstairs, you’ll lose your job,” Denver continued, steamrolling right over her.

            “I don’t even have access to the main computer system,” Elizabeth pointed out.  “Even if I was a lesbian, no one would care.  And I’m not, so it doesn’t matter.  Look, I have work to do, all right?  Just go away.”

            “Not without getting what I want,” Denver said flatly.

            “And what would that be?”

            “I want to watch some of your hot lesbian friends fucking each other.”

            “Go fuck yourself instead,” Elizabeth snapped in her head, imagining the way Denver’s face would turn purple with rage.  While she was at it, she also imagined his head swelling up and then exploding.  Somewhat cathartic, but the impact was lessened by his naturally puffy face still being in front of her with a smug grin on his face.

            “Even if I knew any lesbians, they would never allow that just to protect my job,” she told him, before turning to her computer and starting her work, hoping that would make him understand that the conversation was over.

            Denver stayed there for another fifteen minutes, alternating threats with abuse.  And if his father hadn’t come in and asked what all the fuss was about, he probably wouldn’t have left anywhere near so quickly.  But then Elizabeth was left fielding several minutes of awkward questions to which she didn’t have any proper answer…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Personally, I prefer the more natural body shape exhibited by the men in "Velvet Goldmine" over the over-muscled, over-defined one that's been in fashion for men since the 1990s. (Apparently, it's Mark Wahlberg's fault, from back when he was still going by Marky Mark...)
> 
> BTW, I'm sure this is obvious, but I invented the publishers Chevalier et Chevalier. I thought it sounded like a believable name.


	7. Chapter 7

            Thursday morning, Darryl called Elizabeth into her office and had a long talk with her about her sexual history.  A talk _at_ her more like, since he didn’t listen to a word she said.  No matter how many times she explained that she was a virgin—that she’d never even _dated_ anyone—he, like his son, was convinced that she was a lesbian.  And he wanted her to sign a statement swearing that she’d give up sleeping with women.

            After reading the statement, Elizabeth sighed, and lowered the paper to look at her supervisor.  “This is—if I signed this, it would be a form of perjury.”

            “Are you that determined to continue your perversions?”

            “I’ve never done anything perverted in my life!”

            Darryl just looked at her, a stern, parental expression on his face.

            “Look, this thing says ‘I recognize the error of my ways, and I vow to change them.  I will give up seeking pleasure from my own sex.’  If it just said ‘I will not seek pleasure from my own sex,’ I could sign it with a clear conscience, but I can’t sign this.”

            “Why not?”  Did he really not understand the difference?

            “Let me put it this way,” Elizabeth said, with a smile.  “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

            “What?!”  Darryl leapt to his feet, his angry roar deafening enough that it nearly frightened Elizabeth out of her chair.  “Who the hell ever claimed I did something like that?!”

            “No one!  It was just a—an example!”  For fuck’s sake, it was a common enough example of a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t question!

            Darryl sat down again, eyeing her suspiciously.  “An example of what?”

            “A similar situation.  If someone put a paper in front of you that said ‘I recognize the error of my ways, and I vow to change them.  I will never again beat my wife,’ would you sign it, knowing that everyone who saw it would take it as a legal admission of having in the past beaten your wife?”

            “Of course I wouldn’t sign that.  But the situation is entirely different, because I do _not_ beat my wife and I never have.”

            “And I’ve never had sex with women.”

            “You can’t expect me to believe that.”

            “You believed it a week ago,” Elizabeth pointed out.

            “I always had my suspicions, but until your confession at the picnic, I couldn’t prove anything,” Darryl claimed.

            “Right, and that’s why you were always trying to set me up with your son,” Elizabeth wanted to say in return.  She was thinking it as hard as she could, hoping she would somehow develop the telepathic ability to make him understand why his own idiotic hypocrisy ought to make him feel horribly guilty.

            “I didn’t make a ‘confession.’  I let all that harrying prod me into making a misleading statement.”  Ugh, she was starting to sound like a fucking politician…

            Darryl kept hounding her for a while, but eventually he gave up, and allowed her to go back to work.  Not that she ended up being very productive.

            Elizabeth was out the door the minute before 5:00, but it didn’t help, and she still got trapped in the bottleneck passing through the Grove.  (She knew she should’ve taken the highway, but highways at rush hour were scary things.)  Since she was barely moving one car length every five minutes, she didn’t see any reason not to make a phone call.  Hell, no one else even cared about that; they made calls all the time, holding their phones up to their ears and only driving with one hand.  At least hers was attached to the car and would go on speaker phone!

            “Hey, Siri, pause playback,” she told the phone.  Obligingly, the song stopped.  “Siri, call Opal.”

            The phone was soon ringing.  “Hey, girl.  What’s up?” Opal’s voice answered after a few rings.

            “I’ve had the worst day!” Elizabeth whined.  Ashamed of herself for whining—what was she, five?—she quickly explained everything that had happened.

            “That’s rough,” Opal agreed.  “It does happen, though.”

            “So…um…”  Elizabeth had been hoping for some advice.  Opal was a self-employed artist, but she had to know _some_ people who were regularly employed despite society’s proscriptions against same-sex love.

            “There’s only two ways to hold a job, from what I’ve heard,” Opal said.  “Either work for a queer-friendly business, or work in retail at a store large enough that no one notices or cares who you’re screwing.  I’ve heard Walmart is good for that.”

            “I have two Master’s Degrees!  I’m not working for fucking Walmart!  Besides, it’s not a given that I’ll lose my job…and I’m not a lesbian, anyway, so—”

            “Hon, if you get sacked on the suspicion of being a lesbian, you’ll be treated like one for the rest of your life, whether you are or not,” Opal told her, her voice tired.  “And you’re not exactly straight, are you?”

            “Well, no, but…”

            “Don’t let it get you down, okay?  You can move in with us at the farm, and be self-employed like the rest of us.”

            “You’re never going to raise the money to buy a whole farm,” Elizabeth sighed.

            Opal laughed proudly.  “Signed the papers yesterday!”

            “Shit, really?”

            “Yup!  We got it for a song because it’s all decrepit and shit.  I was actually gonna call you in a little while, in fact.  We’re having a cleaning party this weekend.  Everyone’s getting together to clean and repair the buildings.  Like a barn-raising, only better.”

            “How many people is ‘everyone,’ exactly?” Elizabeth asked.

            “Well, everyone who’s going to be living there, for starters.  So at the moment that’s me, Crystal, Aurora, and Pansy.  On top of that, we’re all bringing in as many friends and exes as we can.  Oh, and I know some guys who have a similar farm, and they’re gonna come help out, too.  It’ll be fun!  We’ll clean up, repair things and get drunk!”

            “Um, drinking and hammers don’t mix.”  Elizabeth did not want to watch anyone pounding a nail through their own hand.

            “Yeah, we won’t get drunk while we’re doing the repair work.  C’mon, you’ve got to come see the place while it’s still in its shitty ‘before’ state so you can appreciate how great it is in the ‘after’ state!” Opal laughed.

            “Well, how can I resist that?”

            “Cool.  I’ll e-mail you the details as soon as we finish hammering out times!”

            “Okay—oh, I’m out of heavy traffic.  I better go, Opal.  I suck at talking and driving.”  It always sounded like a flimsy excuse to Elizabeth, but Opal was evidently used to it, because she laughed it off.

            Elizabeth tried to keep herself distracted for the remainder of her commute by imagining Pansy Potter trying to clean a dilapidated old farmhouse.  As someone who hated to chip her highly manicured nails—and kicked up an absolute shit storm at the idea of getting sweaty—heavy-duty cleaning and barn repair seemed like they would be the end of her world.  Trying to imagine her cleanliness OCD somehow managing to live under the same roof as a potter like Aurora Pierce—who thought nothing of walking into someone else’s kitchen and opening their fridge while her hands were still caked with half-dry clay—was also good for a laugh.

            Still, no matter how entertaining those ideas were, Elizabeth’s own impending doom kept creeping in and reminding her just how bad things were about to get.

            She was already living pretty much hand-to-mouth as it was.  If she lost her job, how was she supposed to pay her rent?

            But maybe if she got fired over something so stupid, she could press charges for wrongful dismissal?

            …no, not given what the empty rumor was.  No lawyer would ever take that case.  That’d make them look soft on queers.  A fast track to being disbarred.

            But maybe a little research couldn’t hurt.  As soon as she got back inside her apartment, Elizabeth turned on her laptop, and went looking for inexpensive local legal firms.  Finding one with a free consultation e-mail service, she rattled off a quick message explaining what she had said at the picnic, and what she had meant, and how she now feared she would lose her job over it, and would there be any legal recourse if she did?

            To keep herself from thinking about it, she logged back into that rare book site, and found a reply from the seller in Paris.  “Madame,” it started, “the book you describe sounds as if it could be a genuine Chevalier et Chevalier, but I cannot be certain without seeing it.  Can you send to me photographs of the book?

            “As to whether or not Chevalier et Chevalier ever released any collecting editions of the works of Oscar Wilde, I cannot say.  There are no records of such volumes being sold in Paris on the second hand market, but if it was a very limited run, that means little.  Chevalier et Chevalier operated using old-fashioned moveable type, rather than the plates that had become common in the industry by this period, and could thus—at tremendous cost—print up books in an edition size of but one book.  Because of this, only their account books could ever answer the question of what books they did and did not print.

            “While America had the decency of starting World War III in such a way that France did not become its primary battlefield, Paris was still bombed heavily, as you must know, and many fine old buildings were lost.  The building that had housed Chevalier et Chevalier was among those destroyed; any records that had survived to 1997 were destroyed along with it.  There is, therefore, no hope of determining your book’s validity short of chemical tests on the paper and the leather, but as that would damage the book, I do not recommend such testing.

            “I can tell you this:  in the ten years I have worked with rare books in this city, I have come across only a dozen Chevalier et Chevalier volumes.  Of those, ten were private printings.  And of those, one had a signed dedication from Robbie Ross which implied that he had paid for the book’s printing.  If Ross or Oscar Wilde himself wished a privately printed edition of all of Wilde’s works, it seems likely therefore that Chevalier et Chevalier would have been the publisher employed for the task.  This can in no way guarantee your book’s authenticity, but it does increase its likelihood of being genuine.”

            Well, that was an exciting reply!  Elizabeth eagerly snapped all the photos she could think of to illustrate her book:  front cover, back cover, spine, end papers, copyright page, title page, table of contents, several sample pages of text…everything!  There were so many photos that it exceeded the site’s permitted number of attachments, and she had to send the seller several messages to accommodate them all.

 

***

 

            On Friday, Elizabeth found that everyone at work seemed to be avoiding her.  To the point, in fact, that she couldn’t even get any work done, because whenever she went to ask someone for the files she needed, they were always away from their desks.  After a few hours of that, she decided ‘fuck it’ and went back to her own desk to goof off.

            She spent a while looking through her photos of Yuzu on her phone, and checking her Instagram for activity.  Then the sound of feet outside her office—half-office, since it didn’t have a door—sent her into panic mode.  The phone was quickly deposited in her desk drawer, and she began typing in a blank word processor document.  It was just gibberish, but no one was likely to come near enough to notice that.

            Once the footsteps were gone again, Elizabeth opened her web browser and tried to think of something at least quasi-useful to do.  Without even thinking about it, she found herself typing the name Curt Wild into the search engine.

            It naturally produced several hundred thousand hits.  Even switching over to the images tab, it was still far too many to bother with.  Remembering what the Wikipedia page had said about him only ever having one serious relationship, she added “romantic relationship” to the end and tried the search again.

            The number of hits was not significantly smaller.

            Browsing through the images, Elizabeth quickly saw that about 75% of the photos featured Brian Slade.  Of the rest, the majority were men, but there were a few pictures of him with his arm around a woman, and even a few where he had one arm around a woman and one arm around a man, holding both of them by the waist as if they were both his bitches.

            Just what kind of guy was he, anyway?

            The only common thread Elizabeth saw among the men Curt Wild had been photographed with was that they all had a rather feminine type of good looks about them, though none of them dressed as effeminately as Brian Slade.  Few of them were featured in more than one photo, except for a dark-haired man who seemed to be a good ten years younger than Wild, as well as a couple of inches taller.  He also looked terribly embarrassed, so perhaps those photos were mislabeled as being romantic, and Wild was just holding onto him like that to be annoying.

            One thing seemed certain from looking at those photos:  this was not a man capable of great subtlety.  There was no possibility that he had forged that letter.  If it _was_ forged at all.  And Elizabeth was beginning to think it might not have been.

            No, no, of _course_ it was forged.  How could it not have been forged?  The alternative was too ridiculous to contemplate!

            Not that Elizabeth was able to stop contemplating any of the possibilities all day.  All half-day.  She left not long after noon.  Not because she wasn’t getting any work done, but because she had to leave that early to be in time to join Opal and the others in getting out to the farm for the clean-up operation.

            They were going to be there all weekend, coming back late Sunday night, so Elizabeth decided to pack three spare sets of clothing as well as her pajamas.  Two to clean in on Saturday and Sunday, and one to wear in the car on the way back.

            It pained her to leave them behind, but Elizabeth saw no choice:  she put Daniel Wilde’s letter back inside the book, set the book up on the mantelpiece, and sat Yuzu down beside it, leaning on the book sleepily.  “Keep an eye on everything while I’m gone,” she said as she put the doll in position.  Wishful thinking; how nice it would be if her doll _could_ come to life and put a stop to any intruders!


	8. Chapter 8

            Opal’s new farm in its ‘before’ state looked like the future site of some horrible slaughter in a slasher movie.  The farmhouse, barn and other buildings (Elizabeth wasn’t even sure what the others were), had lost almost all their paint, revealing bare, untreated wood that was gray with age, and looked very brittle.  A rusted-out old tractor sat beside the barn, looking so tragically picturesque that almost every member of the cleaning party felt obliged to take half a dozen photos of it.  Elizabeth wished she’d brought Yuzu to pose on it.  That would have been epic.  She should have brought Yuzu all around; this place was so very photogenic in its current ruined state!

            She must have spent quite a while lamenting her lack of dolly, because by the time they were all gathered in the nearest restaurant—a mom and pop operation fifteen minutes away in what used to be a small country town and was now little more than a place for truckers to gas up—they were all teasing her about missing her ‘girlfriend.’  Even the gay guys from the other farm were teasing her, and they’d never even met her before!

            The main subject of discussion at dinner, though, was the planned activities for the weekend.  Those who could handle the rough work would take the task of fixing the structural problems with the various buildings, and everyone else would be cleaning out the farm house to make it livable.  Which it certainly needed:  the floor in every room in the house was covered in animal droppings left by the raccoons and such that got in through the kitchen’s doggy door and leaves that had blown in through the three busted out windows, every corner was filled with cobwebs, every wall was smeared with god-knows-what filthy substance, and all the door hinges and knobs were horribly rusted.  They were also going to have to get a plumber in to fix all the plumbing, because about the only things that worked properly were the kitchen sink and one of the toilets, but that was for after the cleaning party.  All in all, given the state of the place, it was fortunate that all the electric lights worked so well, or Elizabeth might have felt like they’d wandered into the house from _BioHazard 7_ …

            Once the heavy work was done—and that was probably going to take a lot longer than just the two days of the weekend—they were going to paint all the buildings, inside and out.  There was, of course, much argument over just what colors paint them.  Opal wanted to paint them white, and then use hoses to splatter paint, Jackson Pollack-style, all over every exterior.  Crystal pointed out that would get paint on the windows—which Opal insisted would be the best part, adding charm to the view from inside as well—and countered that each building should have a huge mural on its every outside wall.  Pansy wanted a Gay Pride themed paint job, with each building given rainbow stripes.  Aurora wasn’t sure what she wanted, so long as it wasn’t just boring old red, like the last owners had painted everything.

            The gay men who were helping them out insisted that they weren’t looking at things from the right perspective.  “This town is only twenty minutes away from your farm site,” one of them pointed out, “so you’ll want to come here whenever you need things you can’t grow yourself or don’t have time to have delivered.  You don’t want to have to drive an hour every time you realize you need a light bulb or some more toilet paper.”

            “So what?” Opal countered.  “You think these guys are such yokels that they don’t appreciate Jackson Pollack?”

            “Honey, no one appreciates Jackson Pollack.  The man was a hack,” another man laughed.  “And believe you me, these people will be ever so leery of a group of unmarried women running a farm together.  You make the place look like a roadside spectacle, and they won’t let you in their stores.”

            “We had some trouble when we took over running our farm, you know,” a third told them.  “We went in for the whole rainbow barn thing, and not one store was willing to sell to us.  Kept closing whenever they saw our truck driving into the lot.  Couldn’t sell our excess produce, either.  We had to take it all the way back to the Grove to sell it!”

            “You’re better off going for a nice, classy paint job,” the fourth said.  “Pick a pretty color, and after we restore the gingerbread the house used to have, paint it a complimentary color.  I’d recommend going with white for the house and maybe blue for the gingerbread, but you could use all shades of blue.”

            “I’ve seen green houses, too,” the first one added.  “And yellow.”  He shook his head.  “Point is, girls, we’re surrounded by conservative people, and we _do_ need their cooperation to run our farms.  But their conservatism isn’t like what you see in the cities.  They’re not conservative out of hate or small-mindedness.  They’re conservative because so much of their lifestyle is inherently conservative.  They don’t actually care that we’re gay, as long as we don’t flaunt it and make a spectacle of ourselves.”

            “What happens behind closed doors doesn’t interest them.  It’s what we do in public that concerns them.”  The second one smiled at them.  “So no make-out sessions in town.”

            “What fun is that?” Crystal sighed.

            “You might be able to get away with a single tasteful mural on the barn,” the third said, after a short silence.  “So long as it’s on the side facing away from the highway.”

            “Oh, that would help,” Aurora said.  “Break up the monotony a little.”

            Everyone agreed to that.

            “How long have you guys been running your farm?” Pansy asked, looking at the men.  “How much work are we looking at?”

            “None of us are the original members,” the fifth man laughed, “but this was started up back in the late ‘80s, when Reynolds first started trying to outlaw our entire lifestyle.  A half dozen men decided to get out of town while the getting was good, but no one wanted to leave his friends and family behind entirely and run away to Canada.  This was back in the good old days when Canada was still letting Americans in freely, remember.”  He shrugged.  “Anyway, they decided to be self-sufficient, and near enough to the city that any gay man who wanted to flee the oppression could come and join the commune.”

            “Wow, they actually called it a commune?” Elizabeth couldn’t help asking.  “Weren’t they afraid of being misinterpreted?  If it was the ‘80s, the Cold War was still going…”

            “It was only barely going at that point,” the third man told her.  “Gorbachev was already in power, so the USSR was in the process of folding up, no matter what Reynolds wanted.  But it’s not like they called it a commune publicly.  And we never use the term, ourselves, but it’s more like what a commune was supposed to be than anything that ever actually came to pass in any Communist country.”

            “More like a family, if you ask me,” the second man said.  “To answer your other question,” he added, looking over at Pansy, “how much work you’re in for is going to depend on how you use the land.  A full farm, even at the small size of your land, is pretty much a full time job for four to six people.  But I gather you’re not actually planning on having a full farm?”

            “We were thinking of just growing enough food for us to eat,” Opal told him.  “A couple of cows for milk, some hens for eggs, a single corn field, and then convert most of the rest of the fields to orchards for apples and peaches and things.  And a really big garden to grow vegetables and strawberries and whatnot.”

            “That’s not very practical,” the first man said, shaking his head.  “But if that’s what you want, go ahead and try it.  Maybe it’ll work for you, practical or not.  I’d recommend not converting more than one field into an orchard until you’re sure that’s what you want.  Orchards still require care, even if it’s a little less strict care than a corn field.”

            “My question is how you’re going to get the money to pay your bills and buy your food in the winter,” the sixth man suddenly said, after he’d been silent so long that Elizabeth had almost forgotten he was there.  “If you aren’t growing spare food to sell, where is your profit going to come from?”

            “Three of us are artists, and once we’re not paying rent anymore, we should make a decent enough living selling our things on Etsy and at the occasional art show,” Crystal told him.  “And Pansy’s blog brings in several hundred dollars a month in advertising revenue.  Pooling our resources, we should get by.”

            “You won’t have as much time to make your art once the farm is going.  Though you’ll have more time the more people you have to share the workload.  How many of you _are_ there going to be?” the second man asked.

            “The four of us,” Opal said, gesturing to herself, Crystal, Aurora and Pansy, “and three more are still deciding whether or not to join us.  Right, E?”

            Elizabeth sighed.  “I hate it when you call me that.  And I really can’t handle the commute.  My commute downtown is bad enough already.  Adding another hour to it would kill me.  I don’t want to have to leave for work at six in the morning.”

            “Oh, then you’re not worried about being fired anymore?”

            Elizabeth couldn’t meet her friend’s gaze, and started poking at her dinner absently with her fork.  “It’ll blow over,” she insisted, though her voice was so quiet she couldn’t be sure anyone else heard her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wouldn't want to live in it, but I'd like to see a building given that Jackson Pollack treatment. Just to see what it would look like. :P


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due warning: the second scene of this chapter contains a generic description of the unpleasantness of sex. Not detailed--and only talking about consensual sex--but I thought I should put a warning on it anyway, just in case. If your attachment to the sexual act might be shaken by an unpleasant description, then you might want to skip it. If so, you can stop when Elizabeth enters the office.

            Saturday morning’s work was so grueling that it almost killed Elizabeth—she _was_ at least a hundred pounds heavier than anyone else there, after all—so Saturday afternoon she was given the lightest possible duties, starting with sweeping out several years’ worth of leaves and raccoon poop from the third floor bedrooms.  As she swept, she tried to keep her mind focused on anything but how eerie the place was, and how she couldn’t really hear anything other than the rustling of leaves and the creaking of the house, because she really didn’t want to think about zombies (or whatever the things in _BioHazard 7_ were) coming lurching up the stairs to horribly kill her.

            After a while, her mind kept drifting back to that letter.  Assuming—as she still wanted to—that it was a forgery, who could possibly be behind it and why?  If he was anything like his public image, that Curt Wild guy was practically illiterate, so he was out of the running; even if he cared who his great-uncle was, he wouldn’t have had the cunning to pull off such a delicate ruse.  And as fun an idea as it was to pin the blame on his Oscar Wilde-inspired boyfriend, how would that boyfriend have even learned about the connection?  If he changed his name from Wilde to Wild, then he was obviously ashamed of being related to a writer known for foppishness, and therefore wouldn’t have told anyone, and particularly not the only person he’d ever fallen in love with.

            That left his nieces, nephews and cousins as possibilities, then.

            That and the ever more enticing idea that maybe the letter was actually genuine.

            She had returned to that conclusion for the second or third time that afternoon when Elizabeth suddenly became aware of slow, shuffling steps on the stairs.  The steps continued to climb, with no voice calling out “It’s just me!”  When the steps reached the third floor, Elizabeth heard the crunching of awkward feet through leaves.  From the sound of it, one foot was dragging behind the other, all but useless.

            The steps paused not far from the stairs, and Elizabeth heard the creak of a door being opened.

            Then the steps started up again, heading ever closer to her.  Each door slowly creaked open in turn.

            Whatever was in the hall, it was looking for her!

            What should she do?

            There was no place to hide, because if she opened the closet door, it would hear the creaking hinges!

            Elizabeth reached into her back pocket for her cell phone, but the steps had come too close; she’d be overheard calling for help!  She did the only thing she could do, and raised her broom up like a weapon.  Zombies and things were always slow.  Maybe she could knock it down and run away…

            The door slowly creaked open, and Elizabeth accidentally let out a shriek even before it finished opening.

            “Piercing voice you got there,” the old man in the hall commented.  “Did I startle you?”

            “Er, um, yes,” Elizabeth said, lowering her broom again.  “Sorry about that.  Who, uh, who are you?”  He looked to be about sixty, maybe sixty-five, and he was carrying a push broom and a number of plastic bags to collect the leaves in.  His face _looked_ genial enough, but…

            “Name’s Toby,” he said, entering the room.  “The boys didn’t want me coming to help, but I didn’t want to sit around all day doing nothing, so I hitched a lift and came out anyway.  They told me to come up here and help you sweep.”

            “Oh.  Okay.”  So he was one of the older generation from the other farm, then.

            They started sweeping in silence, but it was only a few minutes before the old man started talking again.  “So are you one of the young ladies who’ll be living here?” he asked.

            “Um, Opal’s asked me to join them, but I’m not planning on it.  I don’t, uh, think I’d fit in.”

            Toby stopped sweeping, and looked up at her, with a surprised raise of one eyebrow.  “You mean you’re straight?”

            “Well, no, not exactly…I’m not either…”

            “Oh, so you’re a bisexual,” he said, nodding his head.  “Been a while since I encountered one.”

            “No, I’m not—that’s the opposite of—”  Elizabeth’s brain was clogged and heavy, as if all her blood had rushed up into her head.  How could this old man expect anyone to talk about such personal matters with a total stranger?

            “Makes me nostalgic for the ‘70s,” Toby went on, not listening to her at all.  “Back when I was in college, when I’d get caught by my roommate with another man in my bed, all I had to do was claim I was bisexual, and my actions would go from ‘disgusting’ to ‘cool’ in the blink of an eye.”  He sighed sadly.  “Wish that could have lasted.  Not that I’d ever have really been bisexual, of course.  No offense, but women just never did a thing for me.”

            “None taken,” Elizabeth assured him.  “I didn’t know being bisexual was considered cool in the ‘70s.”

            “In the right circles, it was.  Lots of rock stars were calling themselves bisexual back then.”  Toby laughed.  “’Course, most of them turned out in the end to be just as gay as I am.”

            Elizabeth nodded.  “So, um, if you were into rock music back in the ‘70s, do you know anything about Curt Wild?”

            Toby looked up at her with a big grin on his face.  “Never thought anyone under the age of forty remembered Curt!” he exclaimed.

            “Actually, I’ll be forty-two next month…”

            “Ah, good old Curt,” Toby sighed.  “He was my first really big crush.  God, did I have a thing for him!  Sexy as hell, and not afraid to show it.”  He shook his head.  “He and Brian Slade came to town on their tour in 1973.  I’d never seen anything like it.  They kissed right on stage, and not a tame little kiss:  from the front row you could see the tongue.  And I was right down front, let me tell you!  I was just 16 at the time, and I already knew I didn’t like girls, but it had never occurred to me that maybe I could like boys without being spurned by everyone around me.  But everyone who’d been at that concert suddenly showed up to school the next week saying they were bisexual.  Most of them were really straight, so they were into Brian—he was so androgynous that they could pretend he wasn’t really a man—but for me, it was all about Curt.”

            “So…do you think he’s still around?”

            Toby looked at her, his face darkening.  “I…I want to think so.  I don’t want my idols to be mortal.  Honestly, in a way I’m glad their careers all ended back in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  This way I don’t have to watch them aging.  They’re forever young to me.”  He paused a moment.  “Why do you ask?”

            Elizabeth laughed uncomfortably.  “Well…um…I found this letter in an old book…”

            “Addressed to Curt?”

            “No, um, to Oscar Wilde.  From Curt’s grandfather.”

            Toby’s eyes widened, and he insisted on being told the whole story.  And Elizabeth shared it.  Minus the UFO.  There was no point in going into that.  It would just make her sound crazy.  “And you wanted to ask Curt about it?”

            Elizabeth shrugged.  “I’m not sure what I wanted.  I guess it’s just, you know, finding out that the guy who wrote the letter—might have written the letter—was related to a rock star…it sort of…uh…”

            “Well, if you’re thinking Curt forged the letter, you can forget it,” Toby announced in a definitive tone.  “Curt was too intense for deception.  He wore his heart on his sleeve.  That was what made everyone love him no matter how many times he fucked himself up with drugs.  Because what you were seeing was real, not a construct like Maxwell Demon.”

            “Who’s Maxwell Demon?”

            “You—!”  Toby’s voice was cut off in the midst of an exclamation of shock that was probably going to go unpleasant places.  He shook his head sadly.  “Didn’t bother researching Brian, did you?”

            “Er, no.  Didn’t see the point.”

            Toby let out a disappointed sigh.  “Maxwell Demon was Brian Slade’s stage persona.  An alien sex bomb.”

            “Uh…”  Elizabeth coughed.  “Like, a literal alien?”

            “Yes, like a literal alien,” Toby laughed.  “As in, came down from the stars.”

            That changed things.  A _lot_ of things.  “So…do you think _he_ could have forged the letter?  Brian Slade?  Would he have known that Curt’s grandfather claimed to be a half-brother of Oscar Wilde?”

            “That whole crew was obsessed with Oscar Wilde, so I’m sure it came up,” Toby said, nodding, “but I can’t imagine Brian going in for that kind of fakery.  It’s too low-level.  When he played a prank, he wanted the whole world caught up in it.”  His voice almost choked off halfway through the sentence.

            “Did something happen?”

            “I’d rather not talk about it,” Toby said.  “For Curt’s sake.  Besides, aren’t we supposed to be working?”

            “Oh, yes, we are,” Elizabeth agreed.  With a weak smile, she started sweeping again.

 

***

 

            Toby left Saturday evening, and didn’t come back on Sunday.  Between that and how much work she was having to do, all thoughts of the 1970s popular music scene left Elizabeth’s head entirely.  She had no energy left to apply to anything other than dragging herself from one room to another to do whatever task needed doing.

            When she got home Sunday night, she was too exhausted to do anything other than collapse into bed and sleep.  She slept so deeply, in fact, that she was almost late to work the next day.

            On her arrival in her office, Elizabeth found a note informing her that the director of HR wanted to talk to her.  So that was it.  She really was losing her job.

            The HR office at CRA was surprisingly sterile; it always seemed to Elizabeth that it ought to have been decorated in a more “hellfire and brimstone” kind of way.  At least the director’s secretary did her bit, though, as she was wearing bright red and had brutally long fingernails.

            “I found a note telling me the director wanted to see me,” Elizabeth told her, showing her the note.

            The secretary nodded, and pointed to a row of chairs, where two men were already waiting.  Three more people had come in—and the first two men had gone out again—before the secretary finally looked at Elizabeth blankly.  “Elizabeth Welch?”

            “Um, yes.”

            “He’ll see you now.”

            Elizabeth tried to keep her heart from pounding its way up her throat and out her mouth as she got up and headed into the office, but it was a near thing.  And getting into the director’s office was not helpful, what with his row of photographs of himself with the company presidents, and with President Brown and both Presidents Reynolds.

            “Sit down, Miss Welch,” the director said, gesturing coldly to a hard metal chair facing his desk.

            Elizabeth did as she was told as the director shuffled through some papers on his desk.  “This company holds a number of defense contracts.  I’m sure you’re aware of that.”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Therefore, it is of supreme importance that our employees be honest with us in all matters.”

            That did not seem entirely logical to Elizabeth, but she nodded and agreed with him none the less.

            “You admit you understand that, and yet you lied on your initial work contract?”

            “Lied…?  I didn’t lie!”

            The director scowled at her, lifting the page in front of his face so he could read its tiny print.  “Right here, prime among the statements you signed is ‘I have never committed a criminal act.’  And yet now it is revealed that you commit them with great regularity.  Or perhaps you plan to claim you only became a lesbian after you started work here?”

            “I’m not a lesbian, sir.”

            He made a face of disgust, and shook his head.  “You could walk out of this room without losing your job.  Just swear to give up your grotesque perversions—”

            “Grotesque?” Elizabeth repeated.  There was nothing grotesque about Opal or Crystal or Aurora or Pansy, or any of their friends!  Why was something disgusting just because it was different?

            “It is grotesque and unhygienic to insert a tongue into the vaginal cavity, the seat of menstrual blood and childbirth,” the director insisted.  As if men didn’t do that, too.

            Something in Elizabeth snapped.  Her pounding terror seemed to create a shortcut between her thoughts and her mouth, bypassing her usual common sense and nervousness.  “It’s just as grotesque and unhygienic to insert a urethra into that opening,” Elizabeth pointed out.  “Maybe more so.”

            “Good God, is that was lesbians are into these days?  Urinating on each other?”

            “I meant a man’s urethra,” Elizabeth sighed.  “Be honest.  All sexual contact between two human beings is disgusting, because the human reproductive system is one of the most sickening things this planet has ever produced.  No matter what your sexual proclivity, it involves unhealthy combinations of orifices that serve as the exit for waste products.”

            “Not good, healthy, heterosexual sex.”

            “Um, yeah, that too.  The vagina is the exit for wasted womb walls, and the penis is the exit for urine as well as semen.  So, double waste hole on waste hole action.  _Gross_.  Why would anyone put up with that?  It’s much more sanitary to leave sex in fiction and fantasy, where it belongs.”

            The director stared at her for a moment or two, then wrote something down on a piece of paper in front of him, tore it off the pad it was on, and handed it to her, along with several other pieces of paper.  “Get out,” he told her, without another word.

            Elizabeth sighed, getting to her feet to accept her termination slip and severance pay.

            As she left the office, she vacillated between reflecting that mouthing off on how revolting sex is was probably not the best approach to take, and how at least she had _gotten_ severance pay, which she really hadn’t been expecting.  Maybe they felt they had to give it to her since they hadn’t actually managed to _prove_ she was a lesbian.

            When she got home, she found in her e-mail a response from that law firm she had written to the other day, which told her what she had already suspected:  if she lost her job on suspicion of homosexual activity, she would not be able to sue for wrongful dismissal, even if she could prove she wasn’t lesbian.  And how could anyone prove that?  Even if she had male lovers to produce, they’d be dismissed as being beards.  And since she had never had any lovers of any kind…

            Well, in any event, the company could now say they had fired her for mouthing off about how disgusting heterosexual sex was, anyway.  Though how anyone could defend something so gross was beyond her comprehension.

            She had a quick look at the websites for the few area museums that hadn’t been shut down, but none of them were hiring.  That meant a lengthy struggle to try and find museums somewhere else that might want to hire her.  And in the mean time, she’d have to hope that she could keep paying her rent.  Though the severance pay should cover it for a couple of months…

            Even though she knew she shouldn’t, while Elizabeth was online, she also checked to see if she’d gotten back any further information from that Paris bookseller.  To her surprise, she had.  He said that “the photos could be of a genuine Chevalier et Chevalier book, but we cannot rule out a clever forgery.  However, I might be willing to purchase it if you’re looking to sell.”

            Elizabeth couldn’t repress a chuckle.  He wouldn’t offer to buy it if he thought it was a fake.  So it was real, then.  And that meant two things.

            One, the letter might be real.

            And two, there was another volume out there, waiting to be discovered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think it was in the scene with Toby that I found myself writing "Curt Wild! Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time." Only obviously then I had to delete it, because it would have sounded like an actor joke, rather than just the side-effect from my having watched the original "Star Wars" movies ten thousand times as a kid, and thus having them 100% memorized...
> 
> (There's another scene later that could have been where I wrote that, but I think it was in this one, as it feels more natural here.)
> 
> And no, I don't exactly agree with Elizabeth's description of how disgusting sex is, but I don't entirely disagree, either.


	10. Chapter 10

            In the week that followed her sudden unemployment, Elizabeth polished up her CV to a shine, and sent it out to countless museums across the country.  It was hard to guess when she might hear back, however, and even harder to be patient.  But she really didn’t want to work at Walmart!

            To try and pass the time without spending too much money, she dove as much as possible into reading and gaming.  Just about wore out the battery on the Vita, in fact.  But it was harder to occupy her mind by reading, because she kept thinking about the other volume.

            It had to be out there somewhere.

            If only she had a way to contact the man who sold her Volume One!  But nothing she had tried was effective; any attempts to reply to the receipt through text message or the Square’s customer service just bounced back.

            After a few days, she had given up on trying to find that odd man, and instead focused on looking for Volume Two by other means.  Primarily by means of running plain old internet searches.  She found a lot of copies of the collected works that had been put out a few years later, but no other volumes of this private 1900 edition.  Not on any of the auction sites—not even looking at the old results for Christie’s and other major physical auction houses—and not on any of the upscale rare book sites, either.

            When she finally did find Volume Two, it was more or less a fluke.

            She’d been on Etsy, looking at her Favorites list and sighing in despair to see that the beautiful steampunk dress she’d wanted for Yuzu had been sold.  But while she was there she had the thought of searching Etsy for “Chevalier et Chevalier Oscar Wilde.”

            And, to her disbelief, there it was:  “Collected Works of Oscar Wilde Volume II, Chevalier et Chevalier, 1900, Pristine Condition!”

            Of course, the price was astronomical.  Even if she _hadn’t_ just lost her job, she wouldn’t have been able to pay that.  Was _that_ the true value of the book she had sitting on her mantle?  It was more valuable than everything else in her apartment combined.

            Elizabeth favorited the book right away, but there wasn’t really anything else she could do with it.  Technically, her credit card had a high enough limit that she _could_ buy it, but it might be years before she could pay off the balance if she didn’t find a job.  Maybe she’d _never_ be able to pay off the balance, in fact.

            She had other things on her mind, anyway.  Every time she went downstairs to get her mail, the landlord seemed to be lurking nearby, wanting to make some snide comment along the lines of “So, I hear you lost your job…”  She always assured him that she was going to get a new one in very short order, but that didn’t stop him from repeating the comment over and over again.

            It wasn’t until Friday that she accepted the inevitable.

            And even then it was only because the landlord brought prospective new tenants to see the apartment, assuring them that Elizabeth would be vacating the premises by the end of the month.  Technically, her lease agreement wouldn’t expire for another six months, but if he wanted to find an excuse to break it, how could she stop him?  Now that those in authority thought she was a lesbian, she had no rights.

            So she did the only thing she could.

            She called Opal and said she’d accept a room on the farm after all.

 

***

 

            Opal and Aurora helped Elizabeth to pack up her stuff and cram it into Aurora’s van.  They still had to hire movers for the furniture, but at least all her personal belongings fit into the van, and didn’t have to be handled by strange men.

            The girls held a big welcome party for her once she was moved in, and for a welcoming present they gave her a pretty nice (if used) digital camera.  “So you can start working as an artist,” Opal explained.  “You’re too good at photography to waste it on just taking pictures of your doll.”

            Elizabeth tried to be grateful, but she wasn’t really in the mood for presents or parties.

            It wasn’t that she didn’t like the idea of sharing a living space with her friends, but…now that she had moved in with a group of lesbians, she’d never be able to shake the new misperception that she was one herself.  And that meant she’d never have another job.  As far as the world was concerned, she was now a confirmed lesbian, and that meant no museum would ever touch her.  Not in this fucked up country, anyway.  Maybe in some other country it would be different, but trying to get an exit visa was ridiculously tough, and all the more so if they thought you might try legging it once you were on the outside!

            In the week that followed her move-in, Elizabeth spent most of her time moping about, taking pictures of Yuzu on the old tractor, or on the steps, or in the hen-house, or just wherever.  At least it was letting her get used to her new camera, but that was about all that could be said for it.

            She used the camera to document it when they painted the house, too.  After further debate on the subject, keeping in mind the advice from the guys at the gay farm, the other girls had unanimously decided to paint the house lavender, with dark purple accents.  Not traditional farmhouse, but it looked pretty.  Crystal joked that there hadn’t been any other color they could have gone with:  “After all, we represent the Lavender Menace!  Gotta step up and show that we’re proud of who we are!”  The rest of the buildings were painted exclusively with the darker purple, so they wouldn’t show dirt as badly.

            Since they only had the two cows, Opal and Aurora were using more than half the barn as their workshops, and Crystal had set up hers in one of the other small buildings.  All the roofing had been converted to solar panels, and small wind turbines were added above the corn field, so they were pretty close to self-sufficient in terms of electricity.

            It was a nice set-up, and Elizabeth should have been pleased with it.

            But she was miserable.

            Every day she checked her e-mail.  Most days, she found a new rejection letter from some museum somewhere.

            She spent hours on Etsy, too, just staring at the photos of Volume Two.  Reading and re-reading what the seller had to say about it.  He was pretty gutsy to sell it for that price after admitting that it was part of an estate.

            But then, one terrible day, it was taken down.  Not sold, simply removed.  No longer available.

            Elizabeth was bummed about that for days.

            After a few days of moping about even more than usual, she was looking over the photos she had taken, and saw that—without even realizing it—almost all her photos in the last two days had included the book or the letter in some fashion.  The book was part of the backdrop in that photo, Yuzu was leaning on it in this one, she was reading the letter in the other one…

            Clearly, this was beginning to border on obsession.  That was no good.  So Elizabeth went back to Etsy, and found that the book was still no longer available.  Well, a lot of sellers on Etsy also had booths in brick and mortar antique malls, so he might have sold it in person.  But he might just have changed his mind about selling it.  There was a chance he still had it.

            And she had to know.

            So she composed a private message to him, asking about the book, and why he was no longer offering it for sale.

            The response came within a few hours.  “That book was one of many that came to me from the estate of a musician who lived here in New York.  About a week ago, I was contacted by a friend of the deceased, who thought his late friend would prefer to see his belongings in the hands of friends and former colleagues rather than sold to strangers.  He and I have been working out arrangements for the sale and transfer of the entire collection since then.”

            Without even thinking about it, Elizabeth found herself typing out a reply:  “Do you think he would at least let me see the book?  I’d love to have a chance to examine it.  (I won’t damage it; I have degrees in historic preservation!)  I recently lost my job, so I have plenty of time to drive up to New York, if you have a shop or other location in which we could meet.”

            She had sent it before it occurred to her that this was a really, really bad idea.

            The response was quite rapid this time.  “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind having you look at it.  And yes, I have a brick and mortar shop.  However, I cannot hold delivery of the goods to wait for you.  If you want to see it, you should hurry.  At present, I am waiting for the buyer’s local representative to come and take a look at the books for him, but once that’s done, he and I will come to a price agreement and I will have to begin the rapid process of packing them up for shipment.  At most, you have a week.”

            It shouldn’t take more than three or four days to drive to New York from St. Louis, but what in the world had Elizabeth been thinking to get herself into this mess?  She _hated_ highway driving!

 

***

 

            To her surprise, when Elizabeth told the others at lunch what she had done, they were all for it.  “The change will do you good,” Opal said.  “You’ve been so depressed lately!”

            “A long drive can be a lot of fun,” Crystal added.  “Though I guess it’s more fun if you’ve got a girlfriend to go with you.”

            “You can always take Yuzu, take pictures of her at the sights along the way,” Aurora suggested.

            Elizabeth laughed at that.  “As if I’d go anywhere without Yuzu?”  For a more wealthy doll person who could afford to own lots of dolls, it would be another issue.  But Elizabeth only had the one; she couldn’t stand the idea of leaving her behind.

            “Have you decided the route you’re going to take?” Pansy asked.  “Some of the highways never have been well repaired.”

            “I haven’t thought that far ahead yet,” Elizabeth sighed.  “I mean, technically, I didn’t even tell him I was really coming.”

            “You can probably just check with an online map to get the best route, at least from here to New York itself.  You might want to ask the man for directions once you get to the city,” Pansy said, nodding to herself.  “He’ll know things like traffic conditions and which neighborhoods aren’t safe to travel through.  Stuff the maps won’t tell you.”

            “Um…yeah.”  Elizabeth frowned.  “But like I said, I’m not sure if I’m even—”

            “I’ve got all these pictures of New York somewhere,” Aurora said, with a wistful sigh.  “My mom was a photographer, you know?  She and my dad used to go there a lot before the war.”

            There was a slight scraping sound from under the table.  Opal just kicked Aurora in the shins; Elizabeth was sure of it.  “I’ve heard New York was a better place before Reynolds I came into power.  I guess all the cities were, really,” Elizabeth commented.  No matter what Opal expected, Elizabeth did _not_ have a hang-up about the war.  It was a long time ago…

            Everyone nodded glumly.  “It was still pretty impressive in the early ‘90s,” Crystal added.  “I went there as a kid, and it just about blew my little mind.”

            “Fucking hell, you’re young,” Elizabeth grumbled.  “I graduated high school in the early ‘90s.”

            Everyone else laughed.  Yeah, of course they did.  Crystal was the oldest of them.  How had Elizabeth ended up being friends with people so much younger than she was?  It was fucking depressing…

            …and it really didn’t leave her in the mood to talk.  She finished the rest of the meal more or less in silence, listening idly as her friends chattered amongst themselves on all manner of lighthearted topics that didn’t concern her.  The daily hassles of running the farm, people Elizabeth didn’t know, the hardships dealing with homophobic harassment, TV shows Elizabeth had never heard of, all the problems that came with having ex-girlfriends…was this what their conversations were like when she wasn’t around?  Was this was most people talked about?

            Shouldn’t there be more to life than that?

            Shouldn’t there be art?  Shouldn’t there be philosophy?  Shouldn’t there at least be solutions to problems, instead of just complaints about them?

            The longer she listened to their conversation, the more frustrated Elizabeth became, until she finally excused herself and went up to her room.  Once there, she logged into her e-mail and consulted her sent-message list, checking the museums she had sent her CV to.  It was official, then; every single museums she had applied to had rejected her.  She had thought that was the case by now, but she hadn’t quite had the guts to check.

            Over on the shelf, Yuzu was seated beside the book, leaning against it, and facing the room with her head tilted just slightly to the side, as if she was giving Elizabeth a quizzical look.  As if she was asking “what are you so afraid of?”

            The idea of her _doll_ mocking her cowardice was far more galling than anything those kids downstairs could produce.

            Elizabeth sat down at her computer and looked up the best driving route from St. Louis to New York.  Looked like she just needed to hop on I-70 and stay on it most of the way.  Allegedly, it was only about a 14 hour drive, so two long days or three not quite as long days should get her there without any trouble.  Before this misunderstanding about her sexuality—and if she wasn’t driving a foreign car—she might have just hopped in the car and gone without worrying about where to stop for the night, since towns large enough to have chain hotels didn’t tend to be more than a few hours’ drive apart from each other.  But now…getting into a small, unknown town might not be a good idea.  The anonymity of a big city was a safer bet.  So she could have a shorter first day and stop for the night in Indianapolis, and then for the second night…well, it was a little bit off the I-70 path, but Pittsburgh was about halfway to New York from Indianapolis, so that was probably where to go for the second night.  And then the third night she’d be in New York.

            Magnifying her path, she checked out just what she’d be using to enter the city, then she went to Etsy and started typing out a reply to the man in New York, telling him she’d be leaving in the morning, and should get to New York on the third day of her travels.  She told him what road she’d be coming into town with, and asked directions to his shop, and—if he didn’t mind—a recommendation for a safe but relatively inexpensive hotel where she could stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Fucking hell, you're young," is like my mantra at work. :( All my co-workers grew up watching TV shows and movies that came out while I was in high school or college. So depressing!


	11. Chapter 11

            In packing her things, Elizabeth had realized the somewhat shocking truth that she only had about half a dozen non-work outfits that were still in good enough shape to wear in public.  How depressing to think that her crappy job had so taken over her life that she didn’t even have anything to wear outside it!  _Yuzu_ had more clothes to pack than Elizabeth did.  And, of course, Elizabeth made sure to bring _all_ of Yuzu’s clothes.  She could never know when a good photo opportunity might arise, and it would suck not to have the right outfit on hand for it!

            Elizabeth’s suitcase with all her summer clothes—and a few long-sleeved shirts and a denim jacket, just in case—had tons of room for reading materials, so she went ahead and brought along some of her favorite books.  Her laptop’s carrying case had room for her iPad, and Yuzu’s suitcase—big enough to hold Yuzu herself, as well as all her clothing—made the ideal place to keep the book and its precious paper cargo.  Yuzu’s suitcase went on the floor of the front passenger seat, the laptop case resting on top of it, and Yuzu herself was carefully seat belted into the passenger seat, nestled in the arms of a large, floppy, plush bear that Elizabeth had picked up somewhere or other.  With Yuzu’s hands on the bear’s floppy arms to hold them in place around her, it looked like the bear was a human-sized Muppet and she was a guest on _The Muppet Show_.  Of course, Elizabeth couldn’t leave without taking several photos of them like that.

            “You drive carefully, okay?” Opal cried, giving Elizabeth a big, wet hug.  “I don’t want to get any bad news!”

            “Don’t worry so much,” Elizabeth said, doing her best to smile.  Driving carefully didn’t really cut it anymore.  Especially with so much tornado country to drive through.  Not to mention the criminal element in the cities…

            As she pulled out along the farm’s long driveway—it was more like a country road than a driveway, really—Elizabeth double-checked that her phone's Bluetooth was properly connected to the car.  If it happened to ring, she didn’t want to have to pick it up to answer it while she was going 70 mph on the highway!  (Even if that _was_ what everyone else did.)  Besides, if she got pulled over, it’d be important to be able to switch her playlist without the officers seeing her touch her phone.  Some police got touchy about people listening to foreign music—even something as sweet as the Beatles—and if she got pulled over by a Committee for Cultural Renewal patrol…!  The idea was terrifying, to say the least.  Only something non-vocal and all-American would do for that dreadful prospect.  That, of course, was what the _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ soundtrack was for; safe, but also good listening.

            Pausing at the end of the driveway, Elizabeth started one of her favorite Vocaloid playlists going.  Fun and engaging, but with no temptation to sing along.  Except maybe in a few places in “Matryoshka,” where she could actually understand the words a bit.

            “I hope I’m doing the right thing,” she sighed, as she pulled out onto the deserted road.

            At least three nights in hotels was a lot of money for the unemployed.  She didn’t have rent to pay anymore, thankfully, so her severance pay would cover it.  But it was still a lot of money to spend just to look at a book she couldn’t have…

            By the time she crossed over into Illinois, Elizabeth was starting to have second thoughts.

            But she’d never live it down if she just went over to Cahokia for some photography and then went home again.  The girls would laugh her right off the edge of the world.

            She switched to her Doors playlist, and cranked up the volume.  That should give her some strength to carry on!

            Or at least motivation to keep driving, since she never had the guts to sing along with what she was listening to except while she was driving.

 

***

 

            The temptation to pull over at every picturesque spot for a picture of Yuzu was an irritatingly powerful distraction.

            She didn’t know if she wanted to stop or drive faster when she got to her first ghost town.  When Elizabeth was a kid, ghost towns were these mysterious things that only existed out west.

            Now they were everywhere.

            There wasn’t any sign of violence—and she’d remember it if southern Illinois had been bombed—so it was probably just one of those towns that got abandoned after so much of its population was shipped off to die in battle and/or moved to the cities in search of employment only to die there of violence, disease or poverty.  There were also rumors of towns that had rebelled against Brown’s martial law, or against Reynolds II’s social mandates, and had been mass executed, with the bodies left out to rot, though of course none of those rumors could name a town that had actually met that fate, so hopefully it had never really happened.

            Whatever had happened here, it was horrible even to think about it.

            Elizabeth switched over to her U2 playlist, and forced herself to keep her eyes on the road as she drove onwards.

 

***

 

            Finding a nice, clean hotel on the edges of Indianapolis hadn’t been difficult.  It wasn’t even very expensive.  That didn’t surprise Elizabeth much:  travel was a luxury most people couldn’t afford these days, and it had been more than ten years since the last Indianapolis 500 race—and unless gasoline prices took a huge dip, it wasn’t likely ever to start up again—so the city didn’t have one of its biggest former tourist draws.

            On the second day, as she was driving from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh, Elizabeth found herself paying more attention to the few other vehicles on the interstate.  Semi trucks were, of course, the majority of the traffic.  But of the private vehicles she saw, most of them were hybrids like hers, despite the tariffs on foreign cars in the last few years—a full 75% on Japanese cars last year, a new record that made her even more glad than usual that she had won her car in a contest when the Prius was first introduced to the American market.

            At a particularly quaint rest stop, after using the restroom, Elizabeth lingered to take some photos of Yuzu on the tiny, dilapidated playground that had been set up for vacationing families back in the ‘50s or ‘60s.

            “Never seen a doll like that,” a trucker commented, coming up behind her.

            “She’s imported,” Elizabeth told him, nodding proudly.  “I’m very fond of her.”

            The trucker laughed.  “I can see that!  You always take her with you when you travel?” he asked.  “Or are you moving?”

            “Just traveling,” Elizabeth assured him.  “It’s more fun this way.  So I don’t miss all these photo opportunities.”  As the trucker crouched down to get a look at Yuzu’s face, Elizabeth hesitated, biting her lip as she looked over at the man’s rig.  The cab didn’t look much different than the ones she remembered from before the war.  A little longer, maybe, a little more accommodating for living space, but…  “Um, can I ask you something?”

            “Sure,” the man said, standing up again.  “Something wrong?”

            Elizabeth shook her head.  “I was just wondering how trucking companies aren’t losing money these days,” she said, gesturing to the nearby gas station, and its sign offering gas starting at $10.17.

            “Solar power,” the trucker replied, with a ragged grin that revealed chipped teeth stained by years of nicotine abuse.  “The trailers all have solar panels on top to power the battery.”  He chuckled.  “The all-American version of what you’ve got.”

            Elizabeth laughed.  “Why haven’t they added those to cars on the market?”

            “No money in it?”  The trucker shrugged.  He paused, glancing over at Elizabeth’s car.  “Mind if I ask where you’re headed?”

            “New York,” Elizabeth answered, without thinking.  Realistically, she ought not to tell a total fucking stranger where she—a woman traveling alone—was headed, but how could she be rude to him after he’d shown interest in Yuzu?

            He nodded.  “That’s probably safe.  Just don’t go to Detroit, whatever you do.  Not in that car.”

            Elizabeth tried to smile.  “Thanks for the advice.  I’ll be sure to keep well away from it.”  Not as though she had any reason to go to what little remained of Detroit these days.

            They spoke a little more—mostly about Yuzu—before the truck driver bade her farewell and went on his way.  It was a chilling conversation to Elizabeth.  Was she in so much risk in some places for driving a Japanese car that this total stranger had felt compelled to warn her?  The thought that there were still nice people who would go out of their way for others like that was cheering, but it didn’t drive out the horror at the heart of the issue.

            But she tried to remind herself that it didn’t matter.  She wasn’t going to go to Michigan at all—despite that the letter she had found had been mailed from Detroit—and she was probably going to return to St. Louis by the same route she had taken to get to New York in the first place…with more nights spent so she could move away from the interstate and see any interesting sights that caught her fancy.  Especially the Serpent Mound.  It was agony knowing she was driving past it without having the time to stop and check it out.  But if she took too long, Volume II might be sent off to its new owner without her ever getting to see it!

 

***

 

            Navigating her way up from I-70 to Pittsburgh was a bit more than Elizabeth really wanted to handle—she _hated_ interchanges and heavy highway traffic!—but at least her phone was giving her directions the whole time, so she didn’t have to worry about getting lost.

            Finding a hotel room was bit harder, and more expensive, than it had been in Indianapolis, but everything went well enough.  After she was safely in her room, she called back to the farm to let Opal and the others know she had made it two thirds of the way, and everything was fine so far.  Of course, everything was going along just as well on the farm now as it had when she left.  Elizabeth hadn’t really started contributing to the farm’s well-being yet, after all.  Probably never would, given her lack of skill at anything physical.

            After finishing her phone call, Elizabeth got her laptop connected to the hotel’s WiFi and checked Etsy for a response from the bookseller in New York.  He had been nice enough to recommend a hotel, and he gave her very careful directions on how she should get to the hotel on her arrival in town, and how to get to his shop from the hotel, and back again.  He made it sound like deviating from his instructions would be extremely dangerous.

            But she’d be finding out for herself soon enough…

 

***

 

            As she was leaving Pittsburgh again in the morning, Elizabeth found herself driving past a blighted area where all the buildings were partial shells, and the only signs of human habitation—outside the other vehicles on the highway—were the occasional signs from construction companies promising that they were going to build something in that wasteland, and hundreds, if not thousands, of bouquets placed among the ruins in memoriam of the fallen.  She’d seen photos of such devastation before, but this was Elizabeth’s first time seeing it in person.  While it did show just how impressive the rest of the city’s recovery from the war had been, it mostly reminded Elizabeth how very sheltered she had been in her secluded little Midwestern life.  It was, of course, slightly surprising that there were still neighborhoods that hadn’t been rebuilt, almost twenty years after the war ended, but the economy had never really recovered, so perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised.

            It made her wonder just what she was going to see in New York.  It had been hit the hardest of all the coastal cities (perhaps due to the enemy learning that the government was in hiding under a mountain in North Dakota, thus giving them no reason to target Washington) and the last Elizabeth had heard, most rebuilding efforts had been stalled out.  But she hadn’t really been following the story, so maybe everything was back to the way it was in the ‘80s, and she just hadn’t heard about it.

            She wouldn’t find out as soon as she wanted, though.  An accident jammed up the interstate, leaving her sitting there for hours, air-conditioning blasting against the summer heat, and forcing her gas engine to turn on several times to recharge the battery.  When she had finally inched along far enough to get to an exit with a gas station, she pulled off and topped off her tank—waiting in late ‘70s-style lines to get to the pump, since all those gas-only cars had been burning through their fuel like crazy in that stand-still—then pulled into a parking space and went inside the gas station.  It was a bit of a truck stop, so it had a little restaurant, and Elizabeth sat down with Yuzu beside her in the booth, turned on her laptop, and accessed the free WiFi.

            There wasn’t actually anything she needed to look up, so she just checked her e-mail, and then messed about on social media and YouTube for a few hours until the traffic jam was well and truly cleared up.

            Sitting in proper air conditioning with a soda, a mid-afternoon snack and then dinner had been far more comfortable than waiting in her car, but it also meant that it was dark long before she got to New York.  She had to navigate by street signs alone, following the bookseller’s instructions to cross the Narrows by the new Reynolds Memorial Bridge, and then pass through Kings on her way to Queens, where he had recommended a post-war hotel only a few blocks away from his shop.  It was a very pleasant hotel, a small operation despite the size of the building it was in, run by a very nice older man who gave her a discount when she told her who had recommended his hotel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *cough* Embarrassing to admit but yes, the first year's Prius likely would not have had any Bluetooth capabilities. I had to switch from my long-used, much-loved flip phone to a smart phone literally yesterday, and until I did so, I hadn't really stopped to think about how the car-to-phone connections were done with Bluetooth, not USB cables. (Even though I'd seen a co-worker use her phone's BT connection to her car to listen to podcasts while driving.) I changed the line implying a cabled connection, but left the statement that her car dates to the initial release of the Prius in America. Because it would probably have taken awhile, in this alternate world, for the Prius to reach the US. Assuming it would reach at all, which is perhaps overly optimistic.


	12. Chapter 12

            Elizabeth’s room was on the tenth floor—the top floor—so when she opened her curtains in the morning, she got her first real view of the city.  She had a view that stretched all the way to Manhattan, still scarred by the devastation of the war.  All of Midtown had been destroyed by the bombs, a wide path of death and destruction that cut across the entire island, leaving nothing but rubble and twisted iron in its wake.  There were a few shiny new buildings on the western end of that scar now, but most of it remained a charred wasteland.

            She shut the curtains again before the horror could completely ruin her day.

            Today was going to be the day she’d see Volume II of _The Complete and Undiluted Genius of Oscar Wilde_.  Today needed to be light and pleasant and full of discovery.  Maybe it was pointless, but she felt like she _needed_ to see that book, to hold it in her hands.

            Elizabeth put Volume I in her laptop’s carrying case—leaving the laptop on the table in the room, with Yuzu sitting beside it to guard it—put up the “Do Not Disturb” sign, and left the hotel to look for breakfast.  She found a nice street level café a few doors down where the food wasn’t too expensive.

            Then it was time to be off to the bookseller’s.

            Following the directions he had sent her, rather than drive or walk through the sticky summer heat, she headed to the subway station on the corner by her hotel.  The station was filthy, so covered in grime that the graffiti stood no chance, and every one of the few tags she saw was being swallowed up by dirt and twenty year old ashes.  The subway train itself was not much better; it had less visible dirt, but it smelled of urine and unwashed humanity.  All in all, Elizabeth was very glad she didn’t have Yuzu with her, and she hugged her laptop case to her protectively the whole time she was in the subway.

            Fortunately, she only had to ride it for one stop, and was soon emerging into the fresh-but-hot air.  It was less than half a block to the bookseller’s, but she was uncomfortably sweaty by the time she arrived at her destination.

            To Elizabeth’s surprise, it was a large, proper store.  The sign painted in the window read “M. Pateras, Purveyor of Rare and Vintage Books.”  An old-fashioned bell jangled over the door as it opened to let Elizabeth in.  The sight of the interior filled her with a warm, delightful nostalgia for places she had never been, in times before she had been born.  This store was the distillation of every classic book store in the movies; it was lined everywhere with shelves, built into the walls or free-standing, all filled with hardback books, most of them clearly very old, with newer hardback books piled in stacks on the floor and on counter-tops.  The dim light inside came mostly from the front window, as the light fixtures were replicas of old gas lights, and produced very little illumination.

            The owner stepped into view out of a side door.  He was about fifty, wearing a smart suit and wire-rimmed glasses.  Didn’t at all look like he belonged in this shop; he looked more like he belonged in an office building somewhere.  “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked.

            Elizabeth smiled, and nodded.  “Um, I’ve been talking with you on Etsy?  About the Oscar Wilde book?”

            “Oh, you’re E-Welch?”

            She really should have picked a better user name.  And probably ought to have identified herself by name in the messages.  “Yes, that’s me.”

            “It’s in the back room here.  Follow me.”  Mr. Pateras disappeared back through the door he had entered from, and Elizabeth followed eagerly.  Within the back room were even more stacks of books, and many tools of book repair.  There was a cardboard shipping box on the table, and stacked beside it were many books of varying sizes and ages, along with packing materials.  “I’ve just started packing up the shipment, but I set this one aside to go in last,” he explained, picking up a protective book case off a nearby shelf.  It was an archival box, just the same as the ones they used for the really rare—or really badly damaged—books at the library.  (No!  Elizabeth didn’t work there anymore.  She had to stop comparing everything she saw to her ex-workplace!  Even if it _was_ exactly the same.)

            Mr. Pateras set the box down in front of Elizabeth on the table, and opened the top.  The front cover of _The Complete and Undiluted Genius of Oscar Wilde, Volume II_ was revealed to her in all its perfect glory.  It was almost identical to the cover of Volume I, except that the vase contained lilies instead of green carnations.

            Elizabeth released a slow, deep breath.  “It’s beautiful.”

            “Yes, Chevalier et Chevalier did incredible work,” Mr. Pateras said, nodding.  “I consider it a privilege to have had my hands on one of their books.  Though given its value, I have kept touching to a minimum, naturally.”

            Elizabeth hoped she wasn’t blushing.  Not only had she not been handling hers without protective gloves, she’d been _reading_ it!

            As she stood there, staring at the book with a mixture of shame and awe, a terrible thought occurred to her.  “Um, you said the man who died was a musician?”

            “Yes, played the guitar or the drums or something.”  Mr. Pateras shrugged.  “That awful ‘rock’ music, you know?”

            “Uh…he…um…he wasn’t…his name wasn’t Curt Wild, was it?”  Even though she knew nothing about the man apart from one abbreviated Wikipedia entry, something about the idea was painful.

            “No, no, he was no one so famous as that,” Mr. Pateras laughed.  “Why would you even think that?”

            “Oh, uh…it’s got to do with an old letter I found.  Apparently, his grandfather was Oscar Wilde’s half-brother.  Or claimed to be, anyway.”

            Mr. Pateras’ eyebrows raised for a moment, then he shrugged.  “You know, the deceased did _work_ with Curt Wild,” he commented, then began to shift aside books out of the stack on the table.  “He kept a photo album of himself with the singers he backed up on stage.”  Finding the album, Pateras began to turn through its pages.  “Yes, here it is.”

            Elizabeth moved to get a better look at the open album.  There were four photos on the page, each carefully labeled.  Three were of no interest—the late owner with his mother, a photo of his dog playing in the park, and a photo of a man identified only by first name—but the fourth was labeled “Me and Curt before the show — June 10, 1986.”  In the photo, the album’s late owner stood posing with Curt Wild, who was wearing a drab T-shirt over shiny leather pants, with most of his hair pulled back in a ponytail, leaving only the front bits hanging down beside his face.  They were both smiling.  Despite that the Wikipedia entry had described him as moody, bad-tempered and generally depressing, Curt Wild looked genuinely happy in that photo, and his smile had a charm that probably melted a lot of hearts back in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

            “Why did you drive so far just to look at this book, anyway?” Pateras asked, drawing her out of her contemplations.

            “Oh, I…uh…”  Elizabeth laughed uncomfortably.  “I have Volume I.”

            Mr. Pateras’ jaw dropped.  “Really?”

            Elizabeth nodded.

            “I don’t suppose you have it with you?”

            She nodded again, and took the book out of her bag.  “I hadn’t realized just how much it was worth until I saw your listing.”

            Pateras gingerly took the book from her, examining it.  “I don’t suppose you want to sell?”

            Elizabeth shook her head.  “I’m very attached to it.”  She couldn’t say that she felt like it was essential that she never let go of it.  How could she say that?

            Pateras sighed sadly, handing the book back.  “Yes, I suppose that only makes sense.  I’m sure I wouldn’t sell it either, if it had been my choice.”

            “Then why did you list Volume II on Etsy?”

            “I was merely acting as the agent to sell those books.  The former owner’s heirs felt they could get more money consigning them to professionals than dealing with auction fees.”  He smiled.  “I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to purchase it myself, of course.”

            The telephone started ringing before Elizabeth could ask permission to take Volume II out of its box to examine it, and Mr. Pateras excused himself to go out into the main room to answer it.  Elizabeth used the time to take out her phone and carefully photograph the picture of Curt Wild, then started flipping through the rest of the photo album.  The first photo on the next page was from the same day, a shot of Curt alone, just after the show.  His hair was loose, his shirt had come off, and he was dripping with sweat, but there was a pleased satisfaction on his face that Elizabeth had never seen on anyone’s face in person.  It reminded her a bit of the looks she’d see on Olympic athletes’ faces when they’re photographed right after breaking a record or winning a race.

            Many of the rest of the photos in the album were personal—the late musician with his family and friends—but there were also other shots of singers he worked with.  A lot of big ‘80s and early ‘90s solo artists were represented, from Elton John to Tommy Stone, but the album ended abruptly with the start of the war.  Probably for the best.

            Mr. Pateras returned not long after Elizabeth finished with the album.  “That was the man who bought all these books,” he said, setting his hand on the stack beside the box.

            Elizabeth just looked at him, not sure why he was telling her that.

            “I told him you had the first volume,” he went on.

            “Oh?”

            “He’s willing to let you have Volume II, if you want it.”

            Elizabeth’s heart started pounding, despite herself.  “I do want it, but I can’t afford it.”

            Pateras smiled.  “He said if you were willing to drive all this way through the summer heat, then he’s willing to give it to you.”  He chuckled.  “The fellow does live up in the barbarian wilds of Canada, after all, where it stays cold most of the year.”

            For the sake of her Canadian cousins, Elizabeth wanted to protest Pateras’ flippant disregard, but she kept her mouth tightly shut.  Mouthing off would be the worst possible way to lose this book!  “Really?” she asked, after she was sure her tongue was under control.

            “He’s wealthy, old and eccentric.  Plans on distributing all these books for free, as far as  I can tell.”

            “How generous!”  Elizabeth bit her lip a moment, hardly believing it.  “Just who is he?”

            “I’m afraid he’s demanded that I never share that information with anyone,” the man said, with what Elizabeth could only perceive as a sly wink, leaving her unsure how to react.

            “It’s really okay for me to have it?” she eventually asked, looking back down at the book.

            Mr. Pateras nodded.  “On one condition.”

            “What’s that?”

            He turned around, and opened a drawer, from which he pulled another archival box.  “Put the first volume in this,” he said, handing it to her.  “Makes my skin crawl, seeing it carried about in a way that harm might come to it.”

            Elizabeth laughed.  “I normally keep it safe on my shelf,” she assured him.  “I just felt like I needed to bring it along to meet its brother.  As it were.”  Accepting the box, she carefully set Volume I inside it.

            Pateras chuckled.  “Pity you couldn’t reunite them with their other brother.”

            “Other brother?”

            “The poetry seems to be listed in chronological order, but it doesn’t include ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ the last poem Wilde published.  Therefore, there must be a third volume.  Probably his essays and letters, though if so it seems odd that none of the other letters saw publication until so late in the 20th century.”

            Trying to process that information was almost more than Elizabeth could handle.  There was a third volume out there somewhere?  “Um…do you have any idea how I could track down the third volume?”

            “It doesn’t necessarily still exist,” Pateras pointed out.  “It could have been lost during the war.”  He gestured pointedly.  Elizabeth suspected his gesture was probably aimed in the direction of Midtown, but she was much too disoriented to be sure.

            Elizabeth nodded sadly.  Her triumph seemed so hollow now!

            “I tell you what, though,” Pateras said, with a warm—if slightly patronizing—tone, as he picked up a pad of paper and started to write on it.  “There’s a forum online for rare book aficionados.  If it’s still out there, the people on that forum are your best chance of finding it.”  He tore off the top sheet and handed it to her.

            “Thanks so much!”

            Elizabeth tucked the slip of paper into her purse, carefully placed both boxed volumes in her laptop case, thanked the man once more, and left the shop, eager to get back to her hotel room and really examine Volume II in all its glory.


	13. Chapter 13

            As soon as the door to her room was locked and bolted behind her, Elizabeth took the book boxes back out of her laptop case, and removed Volume II from its box.  Like Volume I, its condition was so pristine that it made Elizabeth wonder if somewhere there was a painting of these books, taking the damage of the years in their place, in response to some soul’s desperate prayer.

            Volume II’s spine matched Volume I’s exactly, and the marbled endpapers were of the same colors.  The table of contents revealed all of Oscar Wilde’s plays, as well as the poetry Mr. Pateras had mentioned.  What struck Elizabeth as odd, though, was the fact that _Salome_ was listed twice in a row.  Surely Chevalier et Chevalier hadn’t made a mistake of that magnitude without noticing!  That would be a hard mistake to make even on the computer, but to make it when you were setting the type by hand?  It seemed impossible.  She opened the book to roughly where she thought the first _Salome_ started, and was surprised to see that both the pages she had opened to were in French.  A quick Wikipedia search revealed that the play had originally been written in that language, so that made sense.  At least they’d had the decency to include a translation!  Maybe it was the one mentioned in the Wikipedia entry, translated by Wilde’s boyfriend Lord Alfred Douglas, and then revised by Wilde himself because he felt the translation was lacking.

            Gently leafing through the rest of the book’s pages, Elizabeth found another letter.  The envelope was addressed to Curt Wild, in care of a London hotel.  There was no postage, as if the letter had been within two envelopes, or hand-delivered.  There was also no return address.  The letter within was written in the same hand as the address on the envelope.  It was a careful script, and rather ornate, which made it slightly harder to read.

 

***

 

My dear Curt,

            Honestly, I can see Jerry was right when he spoke of you as following me about like my shadow, but to think that a shadow should act so childishly upon being separated from his original!  We’ve barely been parted for twenty-four hours, and already you’ve left six weeping telephone messages at my hotel, sent telegrams filled with oozing words of love that should never be shared so publically, and fired off an angry letter that somehow managed to get to Paris before I did!  Do you see now your incapacity of being alone?  Your nature is so insistent in its persistent claim on the attention and time of others—especially mine.

            Can you not look forward to our reunion in Rouen, instead of claiming that remaining behind in London without me is living in prison, where there is no event but sorrow, and you have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments?  You are being tedious as well as childish, and do not speak to me of how I left you alone to meaningless suffering.  Nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all.  Meaningful though it may be, I do not want to hear about it, especially not from you.  I can sympathise with everything, except suffering.  It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing, especially coming from one as beautiful as you.  One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life.  Of course our separation is as though the very sun and moon have been taken from us, but even if I had time for it, I would not dwell on my sorrow.  I let it remind me that I want to fill my life to the very brim with pleasure, with you at my side, the incarnation of my dreams.  Together, we will eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and go out into the world with that passion in our souls.

            It will only be a day or two more while your paperwork is completed.  Then you’ll become my shadow once more.  Try to be patient, as I am being patient.

            But don’t mistake patience for indifference.  I live for the moment when we’re reunited.  I want to place you on a pedestal of gold, and to see the world worship the man who is mine.  I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter and grow sad.

            Have I told you yet that I have not forgotten—and never will—the first time I laid eyes on you?  I knew that I had come to face someone whose every aspect was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.  I am the lover you won by your song—the only sort of lover really worth the winning—so don’t claim that I treat you as if you were a flower to put in my coat, a bit of decoration to charm my vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day!  Ours is the love to which all other loves are as marsh-water to red wine, or the glow-worm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the moon.  Don’t let the madness of moods of rage master you to your own hurt as well as to mine, and for both our sakes don’t listen to the scurrilous lies of whoever claimed that I said you were not interesting except when you are on your stage.  Not when you are absolutely necessary to me, when I can’t be happy on a day when I don’t see you.

            Try to use your time alone in London more fruitfully.  Write some new songs.  Be always searching for new sensations.  Be afraid of nothing, least of all being alone.  A new Hedonism—that is what our century wants.  That is what you and I must give the world.  We can be its visible symbol.

            I will teach you the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art, just as you showed me that Love is a more wonderful thing than Art.  But if our life together is as the world fancies it to be, one simply of pleasure, profligacy and laughter, then a few short years from now, I doubt I will be able to recall a single passage in it.

            Remember that your Prince Fleur-de-Lys will always love you, and that through us both Maxwell Demon will bring this world to a better place.  Isn’t that worth a little loneliness along the way?

 

                                    I am your own

                                                Brian

 

***

 

            It was unquestionably the most eloquent—if occasionally snippy—letter Elizabeth had ever read.  Certainly it was the most _romantic_ letter she’d ever seen addressed from one man to another.  Though there were definitely a few places where the wording rang very familiarly, including at least one passage that she knew for a fact had been borrowed wholesale from _The Picture of Dorian Gray_.  The passage about their life together not really being “simply of pleasure, profligacy and laughter” was underlined in pencil—rather jarring against the dark ink of the letter itself—and in the margin, in another, rougher hand was written “It is because it was full of moments and days tragic, bitter, sinister in their warnings, dull or dreadful in their monotonous scenes and unseemly violences, that I can see or hear each separate incident in its detail, can indeed see or hear little else.”

            Was that Curt Wild reacting angrily to the contents of a letter from his lover?  Or was it…?

            Elizabeth went to a plagiarism checker online, and typed in the passage from the margin.  It instantly returned that the passage was plagiarized, because it was from “De Profundis” by Oscar Wilde.  There hadn’t been anything by that title in either book…must have been an essay or a letter.  No, it had to be an essay, because who would put a title on a letter?

            More important than how much his letter was cribbing from Oscar Wilde was the question of just who this ‘Brian’ was.  He had to be the man Toby had told her about, the man listed in Curt’s Wikipedia page as his lover, Brian Slade.  But what kind of man was he?  And why hadn’t she looked him up earlier?

            She was about to go to Wikipedia and look him up, when she realized that she was utterly famished.  Well, of course she was.  It was well past noon, and she hadn’t had lunch yet.

            Wikipedia could wait; it wasn’t likely to go anywhere.  Elizabeth put Yuzu and her camera into her laptop’s now-empty case, and headed out of the hotel room.  Might as well see the sights of (what was left of) New York while she was there, and worry about looking things up online tonight.  Now that she was here, she was no longer in any rush.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really ought to run that letter through a plagiarism checker: I bet the result would come back at about 95% plagiarized. :P Most of it's from "De Profundis" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray", with a few bits from other pieces I read in my copy of the collected works of Oscar Wilde. (I literally went through and took notes on everything I thought could be useful for this fic.)


	14. Chapter 14

            After a full day of exploring the city and taking pictures of Yuzu in various places—often to the curious confusion of locals, and every time they asked about Yuzu, she was filled with great gratitude for the fact that her manufacturer’s name, Volks, sounded more German than Japanese!—Elizabeth returned to her hotel room for a relaxing bath, followed by what promised to be a long night of Internet research.

            Naturally, she started with Wikipedia, to look up Brian Slade.

 

***

 

**Brian Slade** (born Thomas Brian Patrick Stoningham Slade; January 2, 1949[1]) is an English singer and songwriter best known as the poster child of the ‘glam’ movement of the early 1970s.  His career was very brief, spanning only three years and three albums, but all three albums went gold, and no fewer than eight of his songs made Top 10 lists worldwide.  His music is often considered a turning point in the history of rock and roll, and the visual style of his performances influenced both fans and many later, more prominent artists, including Elton John and the band Queen.[2]

 

Slade was born in Birmingham, England, to a middle class family.  Little in his life appears remarkable before his meteoric rise to fame in 1971, though it is known that he began singing at a very early age, staging little performances for his family and friends.[3]  His success has often been attributed to his distinctive dandyism, and to his creation of an alternate persona, Maxwell Demon, which he wore like a mantle on stage.  Slade’s manager, Jerry Devine, has claimed that the Maxwell Demon alter ego was his idea, though the members of Slade’s back-up band have denied this claim.[4]  Slade was always accompanied on stage by his back-up band, the Venus in Furs, and in 1973 he was also often joined on stage by Curt Wild, who was then his lover.

 

Despite his popularity, Brian Slade never received any Grammy Awards, and received only one nomination.  This has been variously attributed to narrow-minded homophobia and nationalist chauvinism.[ _5_ ]  He did, however, receive a number of awards in Britain and the rest of Europe.

 

In 1972, Brian Slade shocked the world by admitting that he was bisexual.[6]  This confession came just before he began his tour of America, during which he absorbed primal American singer Curt Wild into his entourage, making him into lover, opening act and back-up guitarist all at once.  Slade’s stage shows—particularly during the time he was with Curt Wild—were all heavily tainted by revealing costumes, outlandish make-up, and shameless homoerotic displays.  This behavior earned him the censure of authorities and elders alike, but endeared him to countless thousands of young fans, most of whom saw Slade’s disregard for common decency as an ideal way to enrage their parents.[citation needed]

 

Unlike Curt Wild—and so many of their fellow degenerates—Brian Slade was not known, during the height of his career, as a drug user, but late in 1977 he was arrested for possession of cocaine.[7]  His career had already been destroyed at this point, but the arrest sealed his musical doom.  Following his arrest, Slade made no further public appearances, and never attempted to revive his career.

 

***

 

            Elizabeth scowled after she finished reading the first section of the Brian Slade entry (which, in its entirety, was at least three times the length of Curt’s).  She really wished she had access to Canada’s Wikipedia—or, even better, England’s!  The American article was fairly dripping with homophobia, even more than Curt’s had been, despite that they came out and called Curt gay, while saying that Brian self-identified as bisexual.

            Still, a biased account was better than no clue, surely.  She had enough training in history and anthropology to know how to look past the surface insults to the meaty core, so Elizabeth forced herself to slog through the rest of the bio.  Most of it was painful to read, but she did get a laugh out of a quote towards the end of the lengthy section on Brian’s career, where his lead guitarist said “Brian’s whims are laws to everybody except himself.”  While it was probably true—he sounded like the type, if there was any shred of truth to the bio—it seemed that the person writing the Wikipedia article had missed the fact that the guitarist was quoting from _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ , only substituting “Brian” for “Dorian.”

            Her interest picked up again towards the end of the article.

 

***

 

**The Death of a Career**

 

Brian Slade was, by both his own admission and his obvious emulation, quite the Oscar Wilde fan, and yet he seemed unaware that Oscar Wilde once said “Nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.”[citation needed]  For it was certainly by his own hand that Brian Slade was ruined.

 

Following the meltdown of his relationship with Curt Wild, Slade became distant from everyone he used to be closest to, especially his wife Mandy and the members of his band.[32]  After a week of sullen silence, Slade appeared on stage at London’s Lyceum theater on February 5th, 1974, and cancelled his career by staging his own death.  The gunman who fired at him came forward months later to admit that the bullet had been a blank, and that Slade was alive and well, and laughing at all the fans who had mourned his death.[33]  This announcement turned the fans against him, and within twenty-four hours they were burning his records and posters in the streets.[34]

 

Slade’s manager alternated between calling it a form of artistic expression and an innocent prank, but no one was laughing.  His income entirely cut off by the fury of his fans, Slade sank into drug abuse, which led to his arrest in 1977.[35]

 

That arrest is the last known information about Brian Slade.  Rumors have been circulating for decades that he returned to Birmingham, but no evidence has ever appeared to confirm or deny these rumors.[citation needed]  Though few remember Brian Slade now, the few who do generally seem to assume that he took on a new name, allowing him a quiet life away from the limelight.

 

Since nothing has been heard of him since the 1970s, it is impossible to know if he is alive or dead, though it seems probable that he still lives, as there must be those who know his new identity, and will reveal it upon his death.

 

***

 

            Well, that certainly explained why Toby didn’t want to talk about it!  Imagine someone famous faking his own death just because he got dumped!  No, something didn’t sound right about that…

            Elizabeth scrolled back up to the description of the quarrel between Curt and Brian, and reread it.  It looked as though _Brian_ was the one who did the dumping.  But if that was the case, then why would he have had such a breakdown without Curt?  It didn’t make any sense.  Admittedly, nothing about love made any sense to Elizabeth, but this made even less sense than usual.

            As she navigated away from Wikipedia and went to YouTube, Elizabeth found herself idly wondering how Brian’s alleged death must have impacted Curt.  He was in Germany at the time— _West_ Germany, presumably, though the author of the Wikipedia article seemed to have forgotten that there were still two Germanys at that point—so maybe he hadn’t heard about it.  Or at least hadn’t heard until it was revealed to be fake.  Or maybe he hadn’t cared, because he’d been bitter about the break-up?  How did men take a break-up, anyway?

            The YouTube search she hadn’t even noticed running came up with a massive number of hits, most of which sounded entirely unrelated to the search terms of “Curt Wild.”  That, of course, was what happened with a name comprised of two normal words.  The only ones that looked like they probably _did_ actually touch on Curt’s career were posted on the official Committee for Cultural Renewal channel, and had titles like “The Dangers of Rock and Roll” and “The Evils of Sodomy.”

            Shuddering, Elizabeth tried searching for “Brian Slade” instead, but the results were equally fucked up.

            So much for YouTube.  She decided to try U-Tube instead, hoping it hadn’t been caught and closed down yet again.

            Fortunately, it was up and running today, and a search for “Brian Slade” brought up hundreds of hits.  The one at the top of the list was titled “Baby’s On Fire; Live, November 18, 1973.”

            The title would have given Elizabeth even more of a case of the shudders if she hadn’t seen that song mentioned in the Wikipedia article.  She was still a bit leery of the idea of clicking on it, but…well, they couldn’t have burned a real baby, after all.  The article would have mentioned it if they did anything so grotesque!  She just hoped the lyrics weren’t going to be nightmare-inducing…

            It took her several minutes still to get up the courage to click on it.  There was a red tinge to the stage lighting, casting an eerie look to Slade’s face above his sickly dark green matador(?) costume as he stood at the microphone.  There was a fast—almost frantic—drumbeat to the song, though the lyrics, once they started, were not sung all that quickly.  There was also a _Psycho_ -like steady _eee_ -ing tone in the background, though Elizabeth wasn’t sure what instrument it was coming from.  (Her lack of musical knowledge had rarely felt quite so acute as it did just now.)

            A little way into the song, the audience suddenly went crazy, screaming with excitement.  The camera panned over in time to show Curt Wild—wearing an ordinary knit shirt over leather pants—flipping off the audience with both hands.  Then he plugged his guitar into an amp, jumped up and down a few times—as if he needed to jump around to get in touch with the beat—and began a guitar solo that was almost hypnotic as it stole the music away from the paused vocals.

            In reaction to the guitar, Brian seemed to become aware of Curt’s presence, stalked over to him, and—

            It wasn’t the right reaction, but Elizabeth couldn’t help laughing on seeing Brian dropping to his knees in front of Curt and pressing his face up to the other man’s guitar.  What a crazy thing to do!  The still image had been strangely mesmerizing, but in action it seemed funny to her.  From the sound of the squealing audience, no one else saw it that way.

            That explained why this video had the most hits; after all, people came to U-Tube to see content forbidden from appearing on YouTube.  The American version, anyway; though the search engine tried to prevent Americans from even catching sight of the titles of videos containing forbidden content like positive or erotic portrayals of same-sex love, once in a while Elizabeth would stumble onto a playlist containing a region-locked video that she couldn’t watch because she was accessing through an American IP address.  Usually, given the playlists she usually watched, that just meant some meddler had translated the lyrics of yet another Vocaloid song and made the Committee overseers aware of it to ban it.  They had caught on to “Magnet” almost immediately (the visuals usually made it obvious anyway), and recently they had banned “Romeo and Cinderella” and a host of others; they couldn’t go two months without banning at least one Vocaloid song.  That, of course, was why Elizabeth always downloaded a copy of any Vocaloid video she liked, because she never knew if it would be there the next time she wanted to hear the song.

            Once the Brian Slade video was over, Elizabeth finally remembered that there was something else she had wanted to do online.  She took the slip of paper out of her wallet, and typed the URL written on it into her browser.  She was taken to the forum attached to a large online antique market.  After running a search through the forum for information about Chevalier et Chevalier and not coming up with anything, she reluctantly created an account, and started a new thread in the rare book section of the forum, explaining what she was looking for, but carefully not saying why.  She made sure to add that she didn’t necessarily want to buy it—though she would obviously love the chance to own it—so it didn’t matter if it was in the possession of someone who would never want to sell it, as long as she would be permitted to see it in person at least once.  She even put up a photo—borrowed from Mr. Pateras’ Etsy listing—of Volume II, so people would know what she was looking for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the massive amounts of cringing my futile attempts to describe music have doubtless caused.


	15. Chapter 15

            Elizabeth made her way back towards St. Louis relatively slowly.  No point in stressing herself out with all that unbroken highway driving.  Might as well take it slow and see the sights.  Admittedly, that meant she was running up a credit card bill she wasn’t going to be able to pay (not easily, anyway), but somehow she couldn’t make herself worry about it right now.

            About four days after leaving New York, Elizabeth was finally seeing the Great Serpent Mound for herself—much smaller than Monk’s Mound, but the shape was so darn cool!—though she failed to find any good ways to photograph Yuzu in connection to the mound.  When she returned to her hotel room that night, she logged on to the rare book forum, as she had every night since first posting there.

            To her surprise, there was a response.  “I saw a book that looked a lot like that in the home of one of my patients,” the responder said.  “Not sure if it’s actually what you’re looking for, though.  The man’s a retired mechanic bankrupted by years of payments for AIDS treatments.  I don’t think he could afford a Chevalier et Chevalier.”  The person’s signature indicated that they were an RMN.

            Elizabeth shuddered at the idea of talking to an RMN, but at least it was safely over the Internet!  And the RMN had no way of knowing that Elizabeth had lost her job due to rumors of being a lesbian.  So she steeled her nerves and typed an answer:  “Do you think you could ask him about it?  Or maybe take some photos of it?  If there’s any chance it could be Volume III…”

            After that unsettling experience, she had to spend a while gaming to try and take her mind off the world.  But even that made her think all too much about reality:  it seemed like every time she called her cousin Sally in Toronto, she’d tell Elizabeth about some game or other that her husband was in the process of localizing, and somehow it always seemed to turn out to be a game that was forbidden entry to the United States.  Hardly surprising.  The censors were ludicrously picky.  Even games that seemed like they should have been embraced by the gun-loving, rock-hating Committee were rejected for the most inane reasons; _BioHazard_ , a harmless horror game about shooting zombies in the face, had been turned away like a used condom peddler, just because it took place in America.  Some fans theorized it was actually the fact that a corporation was behind the zombie outbreak, but Elizabeth was inclined to believe it was more basic than that.  They wouldn’t have objected to an evil corporation if it hadn’t been an _American_ one.  Even though America had a stranglehold on the market for evil corporations.

            Since gaming wasn’t comforting her much, Elizabeth shut off the Vita, and decided she’d spend a while planning her next few days’ route instead.  It didn’t require much thought:  the only place to go next (unless she went straight home) was Chicago.  It was a big city with lots of museums.  In addition to giving her lots to do without spending much money, maybe she could talk one of those museums into hiring her.  There were probably a few she hadn’t even known about to send an application to, after all…

 

***

 

            The RMN replied the next day, and Elizabeth’s plans changed.  “I had a look at it,” the RMN said, “and it seems to be what you’re looking for.  The man who owns it said he’d be glad to show it to you, if you’re ever in Wyoming.  But you’re not a man, are you?  I cannot condone allowing a man to risk being infected with homosexuality.”

            Elizabeth fought the urge to scream, mostly because this was a cheap motel with thin walls, and it was late enough that anyone in the neighboring rooms was likely already asleep.  This sort of thing was _exactly_ why she didn’t want to deal with an RMN.  How could this person have completed training as a nurse without learning something as basic as the fact that homosexuality was not a disease of any kind, let alone a communicable one?

            But there was no point in letting an idiot get to her.  “Don’t worry,” she typed in as a reply.  “I’m a woman.  And I’m currently on a driving trip across the country, so I can swing by Wyoming easily enough.  I’ve always wanted to see Yellowstone anyway. :)”  After a moment’s thought, she deleted the smiley face before sending off the reply.  Not everyone welcomed those, and this seemed like a ludicrously serious sort of forum.

            Once she was done with the forum, Elizabeth started planning out routes to get to Wyoming without taking _too_ long, but without driving hard enough to stress her out, either.

 

***

  
            Elizabeth ended up taking about a week and a half to reach Wyoming, having taken a _lot_ of little detours for fun photo opportunities.  Yuzu’s travels were getting much more love on Instagram than pictures of her around St. Louis ever had.  And taking her up to Yellowstone after seeing the man with Volume III would have to help that, too, right?

            The man lived in Jackson, which was actually very near to Yellowstone.  When Elizabeth contacted her the night before she arrived in Jackson, the RMN insisted on meeting Elizabeth in a little café in Jackson, rather than give her an address over the forum’s private messaging system.  Luckily, Elizabeth was able to find a hotel in walking distance of the café, and it was only in the low 90s at the time specified for the meeting, with much lower humidity than back home.  It almost felt like autumn as she walked from her hotel to the café.

            Spotting the RMN was an easy task:  she was the 30ish woman in decorated scrubs with the gigantic crucifix around her neck.  This wasn’t going to be an easy meeting.  Elizabeth had always been rubbed the wrong way by the hyper-religious, and the feeling was usually mutual.  Until this moment, she had held out the hope that this woman had become an RMN out of homophobia, rather than religious zeal, that she was only a missionary against being gay, and not one _for_ any particular religious sect.  Still, as long as the conversation didn’t drag on too long, hopefully Elizabeth could collect the man’s address and get out before the other woman could drive her completely up the wall.

            “Why is it so important to you to see this book?” the other woman asked as soon as Elizabeth sat down, without so much as a word of greeting.  “The author was a fag, you know.  Completely flaming.”

            “I wanted to confirm something about the book, to see if it matches the previous two volumes in a certain way,” Elizabeth answered, gritting her teeth in every pause.  “What I’m looking for pertains more to the book’s previous owners than to the book’s contents.”

            “Oh?  Do tell.”

            Fucking hell.  “Well, as far as I can tell, these books were privately printed at the commission of one of Oscar Wilde’s friends.”  Specifically, probably his ex-boyfriend Robbie Ross.  But no way in hell was Elizabeth mentioning _that_.  “They were printed the same year Wilde died, and they seem to have ended up with his half-brother, as if they were Wilde’s personal copy of his works, rather than his friend’s copy.  What I’m looking for is evidence of whether or not they did, in fact, end up with that half-brother, and possibly an explanation of why.”  Sounded believable.  Ish.

            “What kind of evidence?”

            Elizabeth shrugged.  “I’ll know it when I see it.”  Hopefully, it would come in the form of another letter, but it might come by way of the man’s explanation of how he came to own the book.  Given that the letter inside Volume II was addressed to Curt Wild and had a hand-written notation on it (presumably by Curt himself), the obvious interpretation was that Curt had owned the book, and accidentally left that letter inside when he gave it (for whatever reason) to the recently deceased guitar player who had, on at least one occasion, played back-up for him, presumably in addition to the band Wikipedia had claimed stuck with Curt for his whole career.  But there was _no_ obvious explanation for how a book in the possession of an NYC rock star would have ended up with a mechanic in Wyoming.  Unless the mechanic used to live in New York and once fixed Curt’s car or something, but who would give a precious heirloom book to the guy that fixed up their transmission?

            The RMN looked at her suspiciously.  “That’s very vague.”

            “I can’t do anything about that.”  Especially since, in all honesty, she wasn’t entirely sure _why_ she was so desperate to get her hands on that book.  The man obviously wasn’t going to sell it to her, or he’d have offered to sell it through the RMN, unless she hadn’t told him how much it was worth.

            The RMN scowled.  “I suppose I can take you to see him, but—”

            “Take me?” Elizabeth repeated, cutting the other woman off.  “I thought you were just going to give me an address.”

            “I never said that.”  The RMN shook her head.  “I can’t risk exposing an innocent to him for long periods of time.”

            Despite herself, Elizabeth realized she was hesitating.  “What…is he really so terrible…?”  She found herself picturing a gnarled and bitter old man, hooked up to an IV he rolled around with him, snarling hate at everything female.

            “I’ve been trying to bring him God’s Word for three years, and he remains unapologetic about his depraved lifestyle,” the RMN told her, with bitter venom in her voice.  “I’ve rarely met such a stubborn case!  He’s the sort who wouldn’t be cured even with years of electroshock treatments.”

            It was everything Elizabeth could do to keep from saying “You can’t cure something that isn’t a disease.”  She only managed it by pressing her lips tightly together and trying to pretend they were incapable of opening.

            “We can leave whenever you’re ready,” the RMN interjected into her silence.

            Elizabeth nodded, and got to her feet.  “Let’s go, then.”

            The RMN led the way to her car—an SUV, naturally—and began to sermonize at Elizabeth the whole time they were en route.  “He keeps insisting that his friends call him Cliff,” the woman said, after about five minutes of railing hate at the poor man for his sexuality and lack of religious fervor, “and it just makes me laugh every time, because someone needs to push him _off_ a cliff!”  She laughed as if that was funny.  “I’m just glad I wasn’t assigned to his case earlier.  You know, he’s demented.  Thinks he and his boyfriend were _married_.  Despite that that would be immoral as well as illegal, and certainly condemned by the church.”  She kept going for almost five minutes about all the ways the Bible forbade same-sex marriage.  Apparently, she didn’t have any relatives on the outside…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the abrupt chapter ending. That wasn't actually where it ended when I wrote it, but I didn't want to have a 5k+ word chapter. The pacing on this fic is really weird, probably because it deviates so wildly from my usual storytelling mode. :( If I ever try to write something like this again, I'll need to work on that.


	16. Chapter 16

            When they finally arrived at the man’s house, Elizabeth was ready to punch that so-called nurse in the face as hard as she could.  Probably the only thing stopping her was that she wouldn’t be able to punch very hard, and certainly not as hard as this woman needed to be punched.

            The house was a bit run-down, but clearly used to be very nice.  A little wooden A-frame, with half broken-off gingerbread and peeling paint.  The remnants of a once well-tended garden withered in the summer heat in front of the house.  Standing as it did in the midst of the deep woods, it had a very picturesque look.

            Only as they were getting out of the car did the RMN finally say “Oh, I forgot to ask.  What’s your name?”

            “It’s Elizabeth.”  No way was that awful woman getting more than a first name.

            The RMN nodded—without offering her own name—and headed towards the door of the house, leaving Elizabeth no choice but to hurry after her.  By the time Elizabeth caught up, the RMN was already knocking on the door.

            The man who answered the door looked entirely ordinary, and utterly unlike what Elizabeth had pictured from the RMN’s stilted descriptions.  About sixty, a little pale and thin, but with a friendly-looking face…though that face went from friendly to scowling when he saw who was knocking on his door.  “What are you doing here?” he asked.  “You normally only come on Mondays and Thursdays.”

            “I’ve brought the woman I told you about, Mr. Wise,” the RMN said, raising her voice as if he was hard of hearing, making the man wince.  “This is Elizabeth, and she wants to see that book of yours.”

            The man’s eyes turned towards Elizabeth, then lit up with mischief.  “Well, I’ll be!” he exclaimed.  “If it ain’t little Lizzie!  Why’d you go through all that charade to visit your old uncle?”  From the sound of his accent, he _was_ originally from New York…

            “What?”  The RMN turned to Elizabeth in surprise and horror.

            Hoping she knew where he was going with this, Elizabeth smiled.  “I just couldn’t resist, Uncle Cliff,” she said, with a little giggle that came out more phony than she intended.  “I wanted to see the look of surprise on your face.”

            Mr. Wise laughed, and turned to the nurse.  “So you can go now,” he told her.  “Me and my little niece got lots of catching up to do.”

            “What?  But—!”

            The old man reached over and pulled on Elizabeth’s arm to start her up the stairs, then gave the RMN a smug grin.  “Bye now,” he said, slamming the door in her face as soon as Elizabeth was inside.  “Thanks for playing along,” he added in a low voice, turning to Elizabeth.

            “I’m almost as glad to be rid of her as you are,” Elizabeth assured him.  “What a horrible woman!”

            He nodded.  “Well, c’mon in.  You want something to drink?  Bit early in the day for liquor, but I’ve got everything under the sun.  Coffee, tea, Coke, juice, you name it.”

            “I suppose I wouldn’t mind a soda, if it’s not too much trouble,” Elizabeth answered.  They hadn’t ordered anything at that café, and it _had_ been a rather warm walk to get to it…

            “No trouble at all!  You just come on in here and have yourself a seat, and I’ll go get it.”  As he was speaking, Mr. Wise led Elizabeth into a tidy living room with a big flat screen TV, shelves and shelves of books, and a lot of framed photographs on the walls and sitting on the shelves in amongst the books.  As soon as Elizabeth took a seat in a comfortable-looking armchair, Mr. Wise headed back out of the room again.  “What kind of soda you want?” he called over his shoulder.

            “As long as it’s not Dr. Pepper or root beer, anything’s fine,” Elizabeth answered.

            “You’re like my late husband,” the man’s voice came back at her from the other room.  “He practically retched if someone made a mistake and gave him Dr. Pepper.  Never saw what was so wrong with it myself.”

            As he was speaking, a glint of green on a shelf caught Elizabeth’s eye.  Standing to look at it, she realized it was coming from a book.  Not just _a_ book, but the very one she was here to see.  It was sitting in a book stand, closed cover facing the room.  The vase on Volume III had a single huge sunflower in it, and in the midst of the sunflower was an antique piece of jewelry, with an emerald green crystal set in it.  It didn’t look like it was originally part of the cover—certainly, it wouldn’t make much sense if it was, since it stood out far enough from the cover that it couldn’t have been neatly slotted into a shelf in the normal fashion—but Elizabeth wasn’t completely certain that it wasn’t original.  It certainly _looked_ Victorian in its design.

            As she heard Mr. Wise returning, Elizabeth started to return to her seat, but her attention was caught by the framed photograph placed next to the book on the shelf.  It showed Mr. Wise as a younger man—perhaps in his thirties—wearing a white tux, and posing with a handsome African-American man who was also in a white tux.

            “That’s our wedding photo,” Mr. Wise’s voice suddenly said from behind her.

            Elizabeth flinched.  Caught snooping in someone else’s personal belongings!  How rude of her!  She turned to look at him with a pathetic attempt at a smile.  “You both look so happy,” she said.  What else could she say?  What was she _supposed_ to say?  It seemed rude to say the man’s late husband was attractive.  But maybe that was the right thing to say?  She’d never been in this situation.  She’d never even been confronted with a photo of a _woman’s_ late husband, for that matter.

            “We were,” Mr. Wise agreed, handing her a glass of clear, bubbling liquid.  “Had more than twenty-five years of bliss—more than thirty, if you count the years before we got married—before he was taken away from me.”

            “I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said.  “What happened?”  Given what the RMN had said about Mr. Wise having AIDS, it was only logical to assume that it was AIDS that got his husband, but it would have been rude to say so, surely.

            He sighed sadly, and shook his head.  “Hit by a car.”  Well, that was...surprising.  “Not what you were expecting, is it?”  He let out a loud laugh as Elizabeth felt her face grow hot.  “I’m sure that bitch told you I’m HIV positive, but that’s a crock of shit.  There’s nothing wrong with me but the early stages of old age.  The local Committee branch used Sandy’s death as an excuse to assign that woman to visit me twice a week.  Claimed it was for grief counseling, but it’s the usual fire-and-brimstone ‘repent now’ bullshit.”  He shook his head.  “I’ve been trying to think of a way to get rid of her, but nothing’s working so far.  I don’t know why some people seem to enjoy making others miserable.”

            Elizabeth chuckled weakly.  “I’ve never been able to figure that out, either.”  She took a drink of her soda to try and mask her embarrassment.  Sierra Mist.  She’d have preferred Sprite or 7-Up…

            Mr. Wise turned his head from the photo to the book right beside it.  “Mind if I ask why you traveled all the way out here to see this book?”

            “It’s hard to explain.”  An uncomfortable laugh punctuated her words.  “I just feel…compelled, I guess.”  She shrugged.  “I drove all the way to New York to see Volume II.”

            “And you drove all the way here from New York?”

            “I was halfway between Serpent Mound and Chicago when I turned my wheels in this direction,” Elizabeth assured him.

            Mr. Wise sighed, and took a seat on a nearby chair.  “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to one of the other chairs.  “Makes me nervous, watching people standing around too long.”

            Elizabeth picked an armchair near his, and sat down gingerly, afraid of spilling her soda.

            “So what got you interested in the book in the first place?”

            Elizabeth explained how this had all started, though in a pathetically abbreviated fashion that didn't even mention the letters.  She hadn't exactly meant to leave them out, it was just that she got nervous and sort of skipped past them without noticing until she'd suddenly gone past any logical time to mention them.  “Mr. Wise, do you mind if I ask how you obtained that book?” she asked, once her explanation was done.

            “Please, don’t call me that.  Nothing wise about me,” he laughed.  “Call me Cliff.”

            “Um, okay.”  Elizabeth was _not_ comfortable with calling someone almost old enough to be her father by his first name.

            “As to how I got it,” he went on, “it was my husband’s.  A parting gift to him from one of his friends, I think.”

            “Parting gift?”

            “When we decided to leave the city and try to find some fresh air out here.”  He laughed.  “Don’t know which of his friends, or where _he_ got it from.  Not very helpful, huh?  Sorry about that.”

            Elizabeth shook her head.  “It’s all right,” she assured him.  “It was a long shot.”

            “What’s the importance of where it came from?”

            Another weak laugh.  “The previous two volumes had letters in them,” she admitted.  “I’ve been wondering if this one would, too.  If that would tell me if the books were really Oscar Wilde’s personal copy of his own works.”

            “What, they were letters _to_ Oscar Wilde?”  His eyes were wide with amazement.

            “The first one was,” Elizabeth said, with an inexplicable sense of pride, “though it was written the day he died.  It was from a half-brother of his who had moved to America, and I think that half-brother inherited the books, and his letter had just been accidentally left inside the book.  The second letter was to the half-brother’s grandson, Curt Wild.”

            “Curt Wild!”  Cliff laughed, and slapped his hand on his knee.  “Thought the rest of the world had forgotten all about _him_!”

            “You were a fan?”

            “Still am!”  His face was split by a huge grin.  “Better than that, I’ve met him.  He was at our wedding.”

            “Really?!”  What were the odds?  Then again, if the books really used to belong to Curt, they were probably pretty good odds...

            “Yeah, he was dating Sandy’s best man at the time.”  Cliff sighed.  “Wish I could show you some pictures to prove it, but he wouldn’t allow anyone to take his photo.  Said his career was weak enough as it was without the scandal of attending a gay wedding.”

            Well, that did make sense.  “Could the book have been a wedding present, then?”

            “You think I wouldn’t remember if it was a wedding gift?”  Cliff’s voice went cold and accusing.  “Would _you_ forget what your wedding presents were?”

            “I’ve never been married.  I can never remember my birthday and Christmas presents from year to year, though.”  Especially because her friends tended to give her strange, useless items she didn’t actually want.

            “That’s too bad.  Marriage can be a beautiful thing, if you have the right partner.  But you’re young yet.”

            “Not really.  And I’m not interested in romantic relationships.  I don’t like people enough to want to touch one.”

            Cliff laughed, hard.  “Now _that_ ’s an interesting point of view!  Can’t say I blame you, with the way the world is today.”  He sighed.  “Life was so much more beautiful in the ‘70s.  The decade had its fair share of shit in its later years—the energy crisis, disco, hostage crises and terrorist attacks—but the first half was a beautiful thing.  That was when Curt’s career was at its height, when he and Brian made the world briefly embrace the idea of two men in love.”

            Elizabeth nodded, with a sad smile.  “I wish I could have seen that time with my own eyes.  But I wasn’t born until the mid-‘70s, so—”

            “Mid-‘70s?  You?  That can’t be right.  You look more like you were born in the mid-‘80s.”

            “August of ’75.  I can show you my driver’s license if you don’t believe me.”  Given that she had a couple of streaks of silver in her hair, it didn’t seem likely that anyone would doubt she was in her 40s.

            Cliff shrugged.  “Can’t see why you’d lie about it.  But you don’t look it.”

            “Thank you.”  Maybe older people just misjudged the youth of others.

            They fell into an awkward silence.  Elizabeth took several sips of her soda to try and mask her impatience, but it didn’t work very well.  She set the glass down on the end table next to her chair before turning to Cliff.  “May I please have a look at the book now?” she asked.

            He chuckled.  “So proper!  Go right ahead.”  Elizabeth got to her feet and turned towards the book.  “I’ve barely ever touched it, myself.  It’s old, and probably valuable, so I always figured best to leave it alone.  Especially since Sandy looked at the table of contents once and said it was nothing but essays and poems.”

            Elizabeth laughed.  “Yes, the two volumes I have are the prose fiction and the plays.”

            She lifted the book out of its display holder, and carried it over to the coffee table, well away from her drink.  Setting it down on the table, she couldn’t help but admire its condition.  Like the first two volumes, it was perfect.  There really _had_ to be something supernatural going on, some _Dorian Gray_ -esque magic protecting them.  Though that sounded quite crazy…

            The number of letters listed in the table of contents was astonishing.  Using her phone, Elizabeth checked online, and there were a number of letters in this book that were _not_ in the collected letters published by Oscar Wilde’s grandson.  That certainly encouraged—nearly required—the belief that it had been printed at the command of either Wilde or one of his closest circle, someone who could have collected all those letters to print them.  Or maybe Wilde had remembered what he had written and had been able to write them all again?  (No, surely not…)

            Gently, Elizabeth flipped through the pages of the book.  As with the first two volumes, there was a letter lodged between the pages near the center of the book.  “Another letter,” she announced, removing it from its hiding place.  Astonishingly, it had left no stain on either of the pages that had held it in place.

            “Well, I’ll be!”  Cliff shook his head.  “Guess we should have had a look at that book at some point after all.”

            This letter, like the last one, was addressed to Curt Wild, but this time it had been sent to an apartment in New York.  The postage on the letter was military, and there were countless postmarks and censor’s marks all over it.  Several had date stamps; it had been mailed in 1997, and had apparently taken nearly a month to clear all the stages of censorship.  Then again, considering it had evidently been mailed from the front lines, that was no surprise.  The return address was to an Arthur Stuart, in care of some New York newspaper that Elizabeth had never heard of.

            “Do you mind if I read it?”

            “Go right ahead.”

            Carefully, Elizabeth slipped the letter out of its envelope.  The hand-writing was very legible, but occasionally shaky, and in several places the page was stained with tears.

 

***

 

Curt,

            I don’t know when or even if this will reach you, and maybe you don’t care anyway, but I have to write it, for my own sanity.  No one will show me any news reports, or tell me what was in them, so I don’t know how much has filtered back to America.  I’m sure the attack that took out the convoy was reported in nauseating detail—nothing pleases the punters more than American blood spilled on foreign soil—but I don’t know if the stories mentioned that I was accompanying the convoy to cover its mission.

            The reports will likely have said “no survivors.”  As far as the military personnel goes, those reports were right.  They were nearly right all around.  I was trapped under the debris from the Humvee I’d been riding in, both my legs pinned down.  I don’t know if I looked dead to them, or if the enemy troops decided I wasn’t worth a bullet, or maybe they felt sorry for me since I wasn’t in an American military uniform, but when they roamed through the remains of the convoy slaughtering the survivors, they didn’t touch me.  Maybe they thought the desert would be enough to kill me.  It almost was; I ended up lying there for two days before some locals found me in amongst the carnage.  My right leg is only broken—the wreckage hit me in the thigh—but my left knee is pretty much destroyed.  They’ve patched me up here as best they can, but I won’t be able to get replacements for the lost parts of the joint until I’m back in civilisation.  Therefore, in a few days’ time, I’ll be on a plane back to England.

            Whether or not I ever return to America…I suppose that will depend on you.

            God, Curt, you have no idea what I’ve been through over here.  Do you have any idea how selfish I feel?  I stand behind the lines taking notes as young men die for nothing, and all the while my mind is consumed not with grief for the waste of human life, but with loneliness because you lost interest in me.

            I think that’s why I alone survived the attack:  “No man dies for what he knows to be true.  Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.”  These poor men in uniform, they die wanting to believe that it was Islamic terrorists who assassinated Reynolds, ignoring their fear that it was nothing of the sort.  But I’ve never believed that lie for a minute, so I can’t die here.  If men die for what they want to be true, then I can only die for your love.

            Do you remember what you said to me that morning in 1975, when I asked you to take me with you?  Among the lies and excuses, you said “There are exquisite things in store for you.  This is merely the beginning.”  Even though I had already read Dorian Gray, it took me years to realise you were merely quoting.  That had been the moment I had given up my last fond attachment to the glam days.  When I re-read that book and saw those words staring up at me from the page and realised that everything about that night had been a sham, that was when I bitterly renounced it all, to the point of swearing (futilely) that I’d never sleep with another man ever again.  I tell you this now because I could never tell you face to face, even all those times you asked me why I had become so boring and reputable in the years we had been apart.  If I waited until I was back in New York and tried to say it in person, I’d never be able to make it.  I always lose my composure in your presence.

            How long has it been since I was last in your presence?  It feels like a lifetime.  Several lifetimes.  One here in the desert sands, watching other men fight and die for their cold homeland, little realising that their country began its death throes in 1980, and breathed its last on 8 November, 1988.  My other lifetimes were spent in New York, the first full of hope that you would change your mind and take me back, and the rest repeatedly pining to death.  It isn’t cowards who die a thousand deaths, it’s unrequited lovers; I’ve died so many times already from my love for you.  I must be the most pathetic man ever to walk this dying Earth.

            I almost envy these naïve fools who fight and die here.  At least most of them don’t suffer.  Not much, anyway.

            Hah, the mind does strange things when there’s nothing to distract it.  I mentioned Dorian Gray earlier, and another passage just leapt to my mind:  “a man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.”  I can’t recall the context in the book, but how apt it seems here!  Brown was very careful in his choice of enemies in this war.  Imagine if he’d decided to blame Reynolds’ death on the Russians!  Rather than a desert, I’d be languishing in a radioactive wasteland, while the whole world choked and died in nuclear winter.  But by pitting the West against the (Middle) East, he avoided the threat of global thermonuclear war, and had centuries of hate and propaganda to draw on.  Did you know that some of the soldiers here are calling this the New Crusade?  It makes me physically ill to hear them talk that way.

            Oh, but I had something else I wanted to tell you.  This should amuse you.  A day or two ago, before they realised they couldn’t fix my knee here, one of the nurses told me I needed to get better soon, because there was a rumour that Tommy Stone was coming out of retirement to perform for the USO and entertain the troops, and I wouldn’t be able to go to the concert unless I recovered.  I naturally responded that if it would let me avoid having to hear Tommy Stone perform, that was an excellent reason to remain bedridden.  She thought I was mad, of course.  Is it mad to prefer good music to shite?  I don’t think so.  I should rather listen to your music than anyone else’s under the sun.  Yours, Brian’s, the Creatures’—how long it’s been since I’ve heard from them!—Jack Fairy’s, anyone from the old days is infinitely preferable to the rubbish Tommy Stone produced.

            How could a man sink so far so fast?  I know we’ve asked each other that so many times, always without an answer.  I can’t help but repeat it, just as I can’t help loving you.

            Curt, I want to see you again.  I could die again and again without you to nourish my heart and keep me alive.

            Please, if—when!—you get this, write back to me.  Even if it’s only to tell me you can never love me again.  At least let me know you don’t actively hate me.  One way or another, my editor will know what hospital I’m transferred to in London.  Please, please show pity and write to me there.

 

                        Forever yours,

                                    Arthur

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, a slightly awkward place to end the chapter, for which I apologize, but if I included the next scene, we'd be at something like 6 or 7k words for this chapter. (It's almost 4k as it is!) Can't imagine why I've suddenly gotten so wordy... (Couldn't be because Curt/Arthur is my ship in this fandom. Nope, couldn't be that. *cough*)


	17. Chapter 17

            When Elizabeth lowered the letter, she found that Cliff had an open photo album across his lap, but rather than looking at it, he was using a magnifying glass to examine the postmarks on the envelope.  She was, honestly, a little surprised she hadn’t noticed him getting them out.

            Seeing that she was done with the letter, Cliff smiled at her as he set the envelope and the magnifying glass aside.  “Thought you might like to see him,” he said, handing her the album.

            “Who?”

            “Arthur Stuart.  He was Sandy’s best man.”

            Elizabeth looked down at the pages of the open album.  Both sides held formal portraits of the wedding party.  “So he’s the one standing on Sandy’s other side?” she asked.  Standing beside Cliff’s late husband in the portraits was a tall, lanky man with a pretty—almost feminine—face and dark hair that had too much gel in it.  The more Elizabeth looked at the photo, the more she was sure she had seen his face before, but she wasn’t quite sure where.

            “That’s him,” Cliff agreed.  “Quite the looker; it was no surprise to anyone to find he’d been able to snag someone like Curt Wild.”  He shook his head.  “Strange accent, though.  He was from someplace in England, but sure as hell not London.  Sounded like those guys in _The Full Monty_.”

            “When did you and Sandy get married?”

            “That was way back in 1986.”

            Elizabeth chuckled, looking back at the photo.  “That explains all the hair gel.”  At least half the men in the wedding party—and it was _entirely_ men—were using much too much gel.

            Cliff laughed.  “There was a lot of that going around in the ‘80s,” he agreed.  “Everyone at the time thought it was ‘awesome’.”

            Elizabeth laughed, too.  “Better hair gel than hair spray.  That was still a thing among women by the time I got into high school.  Even I tried to use it a few times.  Usually ended up getting it in my eyes, though.”

            Cliff grinned, but didn’t reply.

            After just one moment of glancing back at the letter, Elizabeth’s cheer all drained away.  “Did they get back together?”

            “Who?”

            “Arthur and Curt.”

            Cliff just blinked at her.  “What?”

            Elizabeth handed him the letter.  “He spends half the letter bemoaning their break-up.”  Cliff started looking over the letter as Elizabeth spoke on, more thinking aloud than really talking to him.  “They _must_ have gotten back together, right?  Otherwise how would this book have ended up with one of Arthur’s friends?”

            Cliff shrugged, lowering the letter again.  “Maybe Curt gave it to him as a parting gift.  I think he _was_ there when Arthur came back to New York.”  He shook his head.  “God, that was all a nightmare.”

            “His return?  Or the war in general?”

            “Well, the war in general was certainly a nightmare,” Cliff agreed, “but I meant the debacle with Arthur being considered KIA for so long.  When the news reached New York that his convoy had been destroyed, Arthur’s paper went all out.  They devoted the whole front page to the attack, and a good quarter of that space in memoriam to their brave reporter killed in the line of duty.  By the time that article hit the streets, the military already knew Arthur was still alive, but they didn’t do a damned thing to let anyone know about it.  Apparently, they were actively trying to keep him from coming back to the US, or even letting anyone know he was alive.  I'm surprised this letter went through; some censor must not have gotten the memo."  Cliff let out a bit of a laugh.  "You know, the one time Arthur came over to our place after returning to America, he was bitching about how his landlord had held a big event to sell off all his stuff.  He had a family back in England, but did his landlord think to try contacting them?  Did the asshole even try to contact his friends or co-workers?”  Cliff shook his head.  “He didn’t even advertise it in Arthur’s paper.  He said if his friends hadn’t seen the ad in one of their competitors, he wouldn’t have _any_ of his things left.”

            “That’s awful.”

            “I suggested he ought to prosecute the landlord for war profiteering, but he and Sandy both thought I was kidding.”

            Elizabeth laughed.  “How did your husband know this Arthur, anyway?”

            “Oh, Sandy was a reporter, too.  Not at the same paper, of course.  Round about 1985, someone opened up a new club for the press.  Not that there weren’t already press clubs, but this one was special; membership was invitation only, and you only got invited if you were against the Reynolds regime.  Sandy and Arthur were both among the charter members.”  Cliff let out a sad chuckle.  “For a few months, I thought it was exclusively for gay reporters, but it turned out most of the members were actually straight.”  He shook his head.  “I remember the first time I met Arthur.  It was the club’s Christmas party in 1985, and most everyone was drunk off their asses.  An older woman—editor at a small paper, if I remember right—was wearing this lacy, beaded jacket, and decided she’d rather wear a man’s jacket.  Insisted on trading with someone, not that any man wanted to wear her lace and sparkling beads!  Eventually, she forced the trade on Arthur.  She was a very large woman, and he was thin as a rail, so he had a much easier time putting on her jacket than she had putting on his.  He had resisted the trade like a son of a bitch, but seemed completely comfortable once the jacket was on.”  Cliff laughed.  “Before he could finish demanding to trade back, a phone call came in for him from his editor.  Don’t remember if he said what it was about, but he insisted that he needed a computer right away—the club had several along one wall, in case anyone needed to work on a story—and he just sat right down and started working, with music blaring all through the room, and still wearing a woman’s lacy, beaded jacket.”

            Elizabeth laughed, trying to imagine the man in that picture wearing the fringe-dripping tulle and bead kimono top that was in her own closet back home.  She couldn’t quite wrap her head around the idea….

            “Now, keep in mind, I was a Brian Slade fan back in the day—even saw him perform live in New York—so I was no stranger to seeing men dressed up in clothes that would normally be reserved for women.  But I still couldn’t believe my eyes, watching him sitting there, all business and concentration, while wearing that get-up.”  Cliff shook his head.  “At one point while he was still sitting there, writing away, a Curt Wild song came on, and Arthur started sort of gyrating along with the beat, without his fingers slowing down on the keyboard at all.  ‘Course, I didn’t know at the time that they were an item.”

            “How long were they together?”

            Cliff shrugged.  “Sandy might have known, but I didn’t like to get too inquisitive about other men, especially good-looking ones.  I didn’t want him to think I was getting bored with him.”

            Elizabeth nodded.  “What happened to Arthur in the end?”

            “No idea.  He was still in New York when Sandy and I left around 1999—or, no, wait, was he?”  Cliff got up, and pulled another photo album off the shelf.  He flipped through a few pages, then put the album back again.  “I don’t see him in the pictures for our farewell party, so maybe he’d already left.”  He shook his head as he went to sit down again.  “I never really heard anything about him after that time he came to our place for a visit.  Sandy didn’t keep me too filled in on what was going on with the others at the club.  I usually had my head buried under the hood of a car anyway.”

            Elizabeth chuckled, but wasn’t sure what to say.  Instead, she looked back down at the wedding portrait, and the photo of the man who had written that letter.  Was that a prick of green on his lapel?  Seeing that Cliff had set it down, she picked up the magnifying glass and had a closer look.  It seemed he was wearing a green pin on his coat—not the lapel, as she initially thought, but next to it, where the ‘buttonhole’ would have gone back in the late 19th century.  The more she looked at the pin, the more it looked familiar, until she suddenly realized where she’d seen it, and let out a gasp.

            Even a cursory glance told her she was right.  The pin he was wearing in that photo looked just like the green crystal on the front of Volume III.  “Has that stone always been on the front of the book?” she asked Cliff.

            He shrugged, without looking away from Arthur’s letter.  “It was there when Sandy first received the book.  No idea if it’s really part of it or not.”

            “Can I check?”

            Cliff looked at her then.  “Why?”

            Elizabeth showed him the pin in the photo.  “I won’t damage the book, I promise.  If it doesn’t come off smoothly, I’ll leave it alone.”

            Cliff hesitated, worries written all over his face.

            “I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said, clearing her throat uncomfortably.  “That was an awful thing for me to ask.  I won’t touch it.”

            Cliff smiled.  “You said there were letters in the earlier volumes, too?”

            Elizabeth nodded.

            “One to Oscar Wilde, and one to Curt Wild?”

            Elizabeth nodded again.

            “Was the other letter to Curt also from Arthur?”

            Elizabeth shook her head with a smile.  “No, it was from Brian Slade.”

            “Shit, really?!”

            She nodded, a little taken aback by the enthusiasm of his exclamation.

            “You have in your possession a letter written by Brian Slade?  Hand-written?”

            Once again, she nodded.  “Is that—” she started, but was cut off before she could get out a third word.

            “Imagine holding a piece of paper in your hand that _Brian Slade_ held in his own soft hands…”  Cliff suddenly seemed to be off in another world.

            Elizabeth laughed.  “Do you want to see it?  It’s back at my hotel.”

            “Fuck yes!”  The old man was on his feet instantly.

            Was that normal?  Did people usually get _that_ excited about something some rock star held forty-plus years ago?  It seemed odd to Elizabeth, especially considering how brief the  man’s career had been.  But maybe that was the _reason_ for Cliff’s over-enthusiasm, like finding a doll from a line like Blythe or Leggy that only went about a year before being discontinued?

            Regardless of its normality—or lack thereof—Elizabeth followed Cliff into his garage, where his ‘car’ awaited.  At first glance, she thought it was a Volkswagen bus, but the shape wasn’t quite right.  As Cliff was starting the car and pulling out of the garage, he eagerly explained to her that it was a Ford model intended to compete with the VW bus, and that he’d chosen it primarily because it was so easy for him to modify.  The whole drive out to her hotel, Cliff explained all the changes he’d made to his vintage vehicle:  new stereo with all the bells and whistles, solar panels on the roof to turn it into a pseudo-hybrid, more powerful engine, a small refrigerator for long road trips, and all the rear seating had been replaced with two long benches along the sides of the van’s massive back seat, allowing for makeshift beds when no hotel was available, while still providing ample room for luggage.  The notes of pride in his voice as he explained about everything he had done to the car were enough to keep Elizabeth smiling, even though she didn’t give a shit about cars beyond their ability to take her from point A to point B in relative comfort.

            It wasn’t until Cliff fell into a sudden and disquieted silence that the smile faded from her lips.  Turning to look ahead of the van, she saw that they were pulling into the hotel’s parking lot…and all that remained of her car was debris.

            “Did you park around back?” Cliff asked hopefully.

            Elizabeth’s eyes were glued to the remains of her car even as she shook her head.  “That…that _was_ my car…” she eventually managed to mutter.

            “Shit.”  Cliff parked well away from the site of the brutal murder of Elizabeth’s poor Prius.  “Did you leave any luggage inside?”

            “No, it’s all in my room.”  The only thing she had left in the car was Yuzu’s bear-seat.  There was no sign of the poor bear now; hopefully, whoever was responsible for this simply stole him, rather than going to the trouble of tearing him to pieces.  (There wasn’t any loose stuffing anywhere, thankfully…)

            “That’s something, anyway.  We’ll have to call the cops, though.  You go on into the main office and call.  I’ll wait out here.”

            Elizabeth nodded, and went into the hotel lobby to explain what had happened.  Her whole body felt numb.  Why had her car been targeted like this?  There was no automotive plant in this town, so no one here could have thought she was damaging their livelihood by driving a foreign car.  But maybe there was someone in town who used to work at a plant, and moved out to Wyoming after losing their job?

            The clerk at the front desk seemed to be smirking at her as she told him about her car, and asked him to call the police.  When the police arrived, they took her statement, photographed the wreckage, and then the police officer in charge glanced over at where Cliff was leaning against the side of his van before giving Elizabeth a stern look.  “What did you say you’re doing in town here, ma’am?”

            “I was passing through the area on my way to Yellowstone, and I thought I’d stop in to visit with my uncle,” she told him calmly.  It was probably wrong to lie to a police officer, but if that RMN had told anyone what they had said…

            The cop sighed sadly, and shook his head.  “Better not to get mixed up with his sort, if you want my advice,” he said.  “Blood may be thicker than water, but common morality is thicker than blood.”

            “Um…okay…?”  What the _fuck_ was that supposed to mean?  Morality was a concept, not a substance!  It didn’t _have_ a thickness!  And there was nothing the least bit immoral about Cliff!

            The police were finished with her quickly.  They informed her that there was little to no chance of ever finding who had demolished her car, because the hotel only turned on its security cameras at night.  Bullshit in fifteen different directions.  No one turned off their cameras in the day; what if someone was attacked?  It was broad daylight, and what had been done to her car wouldn’t have been done quickly or quietly; someone _had_ to have seen it.  If the police thought there was no chance of finding the perpetrators, it was because they didn’t _want_ to find them.

            Once the police were gone, Cliff walked over to her.  “I don’t think it’s safe for you to stay the night here now,” he said.

            Elizabeth nodded sadly.  “But I don’t know where I can go—I don’t know how to get home again without my car.”  She could take a plane, but she’d have to get to an airport first.

            “We’ll worry about that in the morning.  I’ve got two spare bedrooms at my place.  You can stay the night in one of them.  Let’s get your things and get you checked out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would have loved to give you a link here to show you the kimono top Elizabeth was imagining, but Torrid takes down the pictures of their clothes after they're not on sale anymore. :(
> 
> Blythe is pretty well-known (largely because she's been resurrected in Japan), but Leggy is a bit more obscure, so here's a link about the line: https://www.dollreference.com/hasbro_leggy_dolls.html


	18. Chapter 18

            It was actually only mid-afternoon by the time Elizabeth was carrying her few things into Cliff’s house, and yet it felt as though the day had been going forever.  Cliff tried to distract her with movies, but it didn’t really work.  She was acutely aware that she had been indirectly attacked for some asinine reason that didn’t even really make sense.

            Before retiring for the night, Cliff gave Elizabeth his WiFi password so she could go online and answer her e-mail and do whatever else needed doing.  Her e-mail was less than engaging, and everything in her social media worldsphere (aside from Instagram) was more or less dead, as if everyone she had ever known had forgotten she existed.

            So she turned her browser back to Wikipedia.  Maybe it would have some of the answers that Cliff had lacked.

            She typed the name “Arthur Stuart” into the search bar, half expecting that it would produce no proper result.  It _did_ come up with something, but it was more or less a stub article.

 

***

 

 **Arthur Stuart** (born January 12, 1956, in Manchester, England) is an English-born journalist best known for his war correspondence.[1]  His career as a reporter was of no significance until he became one of the first reporters allowed to go to the front lines in World War III.[2]  More than any other war correspondent, his accounts were full of the pathos and tragedy inherent in the battles he witnessed.

 

Nothing is known of his childhood or youth, and he only enters the historical record in 1978, when he moved from London to New York, and gained his first job as a reporter.[citation needed]  He gained some notoriety among certain circles in 1985, when he wrote an article explicitly condemning the newly proposed 27th Amendment, and futilely insisting that the 22nd Amendment must not be repealed.[4]

 

In the mid-1980s, tabloids several times printed photographs of Stuart with ‘70s rock star Curt Wild in compromisingly romantic postures.  The tabloids did not name Stuart, since he was not then famous, but his face is clearly identifiable in the photos.[5]  This has led many to theorize that two of the songs on Wild’s final album (1987) were about Stuart:  “Make a Wish” would seem to be about the early stages of their relationship, while the darker, more menacing “Beloved” is theorized to be about their impending break-up.[6]  There are no photographs of them together after 1988.[citation needed]

 

When President Reynolds was assassinated, Stuart’s article on the assassination presumed a domestic perpetrator, suggesting that the assassin thought of himself as a patriot, as a Brutus, a Cassius, a Harmodius or an Aristogiton.[7]  When the truth was revealed that it was an act of war at the instigation of Saddam Hussein, Stuart’s paper printed a full retraction of his interpretation of the assassination, but Stuart himself would not sign off on it.[8]  It was, therefore, surprising to all who followed the matter closely that he was allowed to go to the front lines.

 

It may have been his peacenik attitude that allowed Stuart to convey so poignantly the grim scenes that played out on the battlefields of the Middle East.  Whatever the reason, several of his war stories were nominated for very prestigious awards while he was still on the front lines.[9]  In 1997, he was accompanying a military convoy on their way to a black op.  The convoy was attacked in a satellite dark zone, and all military personnel were killed.  Stuart was also believed to have been killed, and was mourned by his peers and readers alike.[10]  That he survived was not revealed to the public for more than a month, and the news was met with jubilation.[11]  Though not killed, he was badly injured in the attack, no longer fit for active duty on the front lines, and soon returned to America.

 

Stuart received a hero’s welcome on his return to New York, and his first-hand account of the attack on the convoy and his near-death experience won him a Pulitzer Prize some months later.[12]  The award ceremony was his last recorded public appearance.[citation needed]  Stuart wrote a few editorials after his return, but they were on unpatriotic subjects—some anti-war and others pro-gay—and met with harsh disapproval from all quarters.[13]

 

Arthur Stuart’s current whereabouts are unknown.  He is not believed to be living in the United States at this time, but there is no firm proof.[citation needed]  The most likely explanation is that he returned to England.

 

***

 

            The Wikipedia entry included two photographs, one of Arthur accepting his Pulitzer Prize, and the other showing him looking embarrassed as Curt Wild grabbed him by the waist.  Of _course_!  That was where Elizabeth had seen his face before!  Those photos had come up in her earlier search about Curt Wild’s romantic partners, the only one other than Brian Slade to come up more than one or two times.  Given the humiliated look on his face, Elizabeth had assumed from the photos that they weren’t actually involved, but at least his letter proved that his _feelings_ were very different from how he had looked in those photos.

            Still, it hadn’t been a very informative article in terms of “where is he now?”

            Quietly, Elizabeth padded out of the guest bedroom, and into the living room, where Volume III was still sitting on the coffee table, with the letter folded back up inside it.  She brought both back to the bedroom, and shut the door behind her.  Magnifying the images from the Wikipedia article revealed that Arthur was wearing a green pin in both photos, and that the pin perfectly matched the crystal on the front of Volume III.  Despite herself, Elizabeth couldn’t help taking a closer look at the crystal and its antique setting.

            The tiniest tug slipped it right off the front of the book.  It really was a pin, in an old Victorian-style straight-pin setting.  Though it most assuredly didn’t belong there, Elizabeth returned it to the front of the book after confirming that.  It wasn’t her book, after all, so it wasn’t her place to remove it just because it was damaging the book.

            That hadn’t been why she’d brought the book in here anyway, she reminded herself quickly.  Taking the letter back out, Elizabeth glanced it over, trying to remember what it was about it that had left her with further questions.  There was the idle speculation of whose tears had dropped down onto the paper—were they Arthur’s?  Curt’s? or was some compassionate censor moved by the forlorn lover shtick?—but that couldn’t have been what was eating at her.

            No, here it was, a passage at the end:  “I naturally responded that if it would let me avoid having to hear Tommy Stone perform, that was an excellent reason to remain bedridden.  She thought I was mad, of course.  Is it mad to prefer good music to shite?  I don’t think so.  I should rather listen to your music than anyone else’s under the sun.  Yours, Brian’s, the Creatures’—how long it’s been since I’ve heard from them!—Jack Fairy’s, anyone from the old days is infinitely preferable to the rubbish Tommy Stone produced.

            “How could a man sink so far so fast?  I know we’ve asked each other that so many times, always without an answer.”

            Elizabeth vaguely remembered Tommy Stone as a ludicrously popular singer from the ‘80s, one of the few to have the blessings of the Committee for Cultural Renewal, but she couldn’t for the life of her name even one of his songs.  (Then again, no one had listened to popular music in her household, so how could she have?)  The truly perplexing part, to her mind, was the question “How could a man sink so far so fast?”  What had he sunk from?  The context seemed to imply that his top-of-the-world career was the _low_ point, not the high, but if that was the case, then what on earth could be the _high_?

            Maybe Wikipedia could furnish her with an answer to _that_ question, since it hadn’t furnished her any answer to what had happened to Arthur Stuart in the years since the war.

 

***

 

 **Tommy Stone** is an American singer and songwriter, now retired.  He took the music world by storm in 1980, and was at the top of the charts for fifteen years, before abruptly disappearing from the public eye.[1]

 

Nothing is known of Tommy Stone’s childhood or youth, not even where or when he was born.[citation needed]  The earliest record of his existence is in late 1979, when he signed a record deal based on a few demo tracks.[2]  His first album came out in 1980, and had gone gold before the year was out.  He performed at President Reynolds’ inauguration in January of 1981—and at all three of his subsequent inaugurations—and became the creative spokesman for the Committee for Cultural Renewal when it was introduced later that year.[3]

 

As stipulated in Reynolds’ will, Tommy Stone performed “Amazing Grace” at the martyred president’s funeral.[4]  Following that performance, he put out a press release announcing his retirement, and has not been heard from since.[5]

 

The most common theory is that “Tommy Stone” was an alias, and that following his retirement, he resumed his original name, returning to a quiet life in the shadows.[6]  Other theories have circulated, ranging from the un-American notion that he was a puppet in Reynolds’ control to the laughable prospect that he was an alien who returned to the stars after his favorite human was killed.[citation needed]

 

***

 

            Well, that was odd.  There was a long section on Stone’s musical career, but it didn’t provide Elizabeth with any insight.  It _did_ link to some YouTube videos of his concerts, which quickly informed her just why Arthur and Curt saw Stone’s music as a low point:  it sucked shit.  But did that mean that they knew who he was before he became Tommy Stone?  And that he’d been a musician then, too, only then he’d been a _good_ one?  It was hard to imagine anyone putting up with such crappy music if they didn’t have to, though…

            Sighing, Elizabeth turned off her computer again, and set all three volumes side by side on the desk.  This new letter was fascinating, but it hadn’t gotten to her deepest questions.  Had these books been Oscar Wilde’s personal copies of his own works?  Was that first letter genuine?  If it was, did Daniel Wilde really see a UFO?

            Even as much as she wanted to know the answers…did they even matter?  It couldn’t change anything if the books really had belonged to Oscar Wilde personally.  Since no one had ever heard of Daniel Wilde, it hardly mattered if the letter was real or not.  And there was no such thing as a UFO, so even if the letter was genuine, he didn’t really see a flying saucer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, that first Wikipedia article...! I *HATE* that I had to falsely accuse a real person of a crime, even though it was only in the context of propaganda within a dystopian fanfic. But that's exactly what would have happened, exactly where the blame would have been laid to allow for the war to distract the population as they lost even more of their civil liberties. Oh, but to clarify something a tiny bit earlier in that article, Arthur had specifically made the comparison to Harmodius and Aristogiton in his article on the assassination, rather than the homophobic Wikipedia writer knowing who (and what) they were and referencing them anyway.
> 
> I'm aware that the pin wasn't in the old-school straight pin setting when we see it close-up in 1984, but it's not hard to imagine Arthur having it restored to its original Victorian condition.


	19. Chapter 19

            When Elizabeth woke up in the morning, she could smell bacon frying.  Perplexed, she got out of bed and slipped into her clothes before heading out into the kitchen.  There she found Cliff making breakfast.

            “How do you like your eggs?” he asked.

            Elizabeth had to stifle a yawn before she could answer.  “I dunno.  Scrambled, I guess.”  She wasn’t really an egg person, but she didn’t mind eating them in a pinch.

            “Okay.  Coffee maker’s over by the fridge.”

            “I’m not a coffee person.”

            “How do you wake up in the morning, then?”  Cliff looked at her with disbelief as he spoke.

            “Soda.”

            He laughed.  “Well, there’s plenty of that in the fridge.  Help yourself.”

            Elizabeth grabbed a can out of the refrigerator, then sat down with it.  “Oh, um, can I help?” she asked.

            “I’m not doing anything I wouldn’t be doing anyway,” Cliff assured her.  “I can handle this just fine.  Have you decided how you’re going to get back home?”

            Elizabeth sighed.  “Fly, I suppose,” she answered, trying not to sound quite as morose as she felt.  “My insurance will pony up a few dollars for the trashed car, but not enough to get a new one.  After I go through the rigmarole of getting plane tickets, I’ll be totally out of money.  Guess this little adventure has put an end to my quest for the truth.”

            “Was there more you wanted to learn?”

            “Well, yeah.”  Elizabeth chuckled, but it sounded sad to her.  “There always is.  But especially I…I still want to know what the deal is with those books.  Were they really Oscar Wilde’s personal copies?  Did they end up in America because someone gave them to his alleged half-brother?  Did they get passed along that bloodline until they ended up with Curt Wild?  Why aren’t they _still_ with him?”  She shook her head.  “Stuff like that.”

            “So what you need to do is talk to Curt Wild,” Cliff concluded, as he served up the breakfast, after several minutes of silence.

            “Yeah, but Wikipedia doesn’t even know where he is anymore.  And if he’s still in New York…well, it’s a big city, and what if he was living in Midtown when—”

            “A little bombing wouldn’t take out someone like Curt Wild!” Cliff exclaimed.  “Besides, he lived in Brooklyn.”  He sat down at the table with his own breakfast.  “Believe me, you don’t have to worry about the bombing having gotten him:  I saw him _after_ the bombs fell, remember?”

            “Oh, right.”  He still could have gone up in the inundation of Upper Michigan, though.

            “Do you want to meet him?”

            Elizabeth bit her lip a moment.  It would probably be pretty insulting to a former rock star if someone wanted to meet him who had no knowledge of his music at all, and just wanted to ask him about his grandfather.  On the other hand…  “Yeah,” she admitted, with an uncomfortable nod.

            “I know some people,” Cliff said, with a proud grin.  “I should be able to help.”

            “But I can’t just go chasing off around the country anymore, now that I don’t have a car.”

            “I’ll drive you.”

            “What?  But I couldn’t impose like that…”

            “Kid, all I have here is a lot of painful memories and an obnoxious woman who comes by twice a week to tell me I’m going to Hell because I like to have sex with men.  I could use the time away.”

            Elizabeth laughed.

            “Unless you wouldn’t feel safe driving across the country with a fag.”

            “It’s straight men I’m afraid of.”

            “It’s settled, then!”  Cliff laughed.  “I’m looking forward to seeing what Curt’s up to these days.”

            He continued to talk eagerly about the notion, but all Elizabeth could think was “But what if he’s dead?”

 

***

 

            It took Cliff several days to set his affairs in enough order to allow him to leave town on an extended vacation of unspecified length.  On the one day in that time when the RMN was scheduled to visit, Cliff loaned Elizabeth his van and told her to go see the Grand Tetons or something, because he didn’t want to have to deal with what that woman was going to say if she found them planning a driving trip together.  She was probably going to say all the same things anyway, but Elizabeth was just as happy not hearing them.  Besides, she’d heard the Tetons were the most beautiful mountain range in America, and she wanted a closer view of them than she had from in Jackson.

            Learning to drive the van was an adventure unto itself, since she’d never driven stick before—thank goodness for the Internet, smart phones and how-to videos!—but the mountains were worth the work.  Still snow-covered despite the summer heat, their magnificent peaks were a true testament to the majesty of Nature, and quite took away Elizabeth’s desire to cheapen them by taking photos of Yuzu with the mountains as a backdrop.  As she sat at the side of the road gazing at the mountains, Elizabeth found herself wishing that she could have seen them before the park’s beauty was ruined by oil drills.

            Cliff was ready to leave the day after Elizabeth’s little day trip.  She insisted on carrying his bags to the van—claiming that it wasn’t because he was old, but to make up for all he was doing to help her—but it took both of them to find a way to stow everything so that it wouldn’t slide around every time the van turned a corner.  Once the luggage was in place, Elizabeth couldn’t resist setting Yuzu on top of it for a quick picture.

            “What is it with you and that doll?” Cliff asked, watching her through narrowed eyes.

            “It’s just…part of who I am?”  Elizabeth let out a nervous little laugh.  “I can’t really explain it.”

            “Why is its skin yellow?”

            “Oh, her former owner left her exposed to direct light too long.  Resin is damaged by too much sunlight, and that makes it turn yellow.”

            “And you bought a doll in that condition?”

            “Yeah.  Haven’t you ever bought a trashed car cheap so you could repair it?” Elizabeth countered.

            Cliff chuckled.  “You’re standing in one!”  He shook his head.  “So how do you make her skin go back to normal?”

            “I don’t.  But I was planning on dying her a wild color like blue or purple someday.  Only that’s a bit more work than I was expecting, so I never got around to it.  And I’ve gotten used to her being this color.”  Elizabeth smiled.  “After all, someone has to love them after they’ve been abused or they’ll just droop about on a shelf full of used goods somewhere until the end of time.”

            Cliff frowned slightly, his eyebrows knitting together.  “If you say so.”  He shrugged.  “Time’s a-wasting; we should get going.”

            Elizabeth nodded, and carefully strapped Yuzu into one of the passenger seats, nestled in between her laptop and a piece of Cliff’s luggage that held all three volumes of _The Complete and Undiluted Genius of Oscar Wilde_.  Then she got into the passenger seat in front, and put on her own seatbelt.

            Cliff set an old plastic milk crate in between the seats.  “What do you want to listen to?” he asked.  “I’ve got everything in here.”

            As he went around the outside to get into the driver’s seat, Elizabeth looked into the milk crate.  It certainly did have everything, short of 8-track tapes.  “Um, I don’t think you can use vinyl in a car,” she pointed out, looking at the LPs that took up about half of the crate.

            “They might not play very well while we’re moving, but we can use ‘em,” Cliff assured her.  “There’s a USB turntable in one of the cabinets I installed behind your seat, and the new stereo takes USB.”

            “Oh.”  Well, that was just slightly nuts.  Then again, he said earlier that he and his late husband used to use this van as an RV, so maybe it wasn’t quite as nuts.  “Um, as to what we should listen to, I thought if I’m going to meet this Curt Wild, then maybe I should hear some of his music first.  If you have any.”

            “Of course I do!” Cliff exclaimed, his voice carrying the pang of wounded pride.  “Most of it’s vinyl, though.”  He sighed sadly.  “Before the censorship committees started paying so much attention to it, YouTube used to carry a lot of recordings of his live performances.  That would have been perfect.  He’s always better live than in a recording booth.”

            “They might have been uploaded to U-Tube after they were taken down from YouTube,” Elizabeth thought aloud.

            “What kind of nonsense is that?”

            Elizabeth laughed.  “Not Y-O-U-Tube, just U-Tube.  It stands for ‘underground.’  It’s like an old pirated radio station,” she explained, trying not to think about _Pump Up the Volume_.  “It’s totally illegal, but they always manage to restore it after the government shuts it down.”

            Cliff grinned.  “That sounds like the perfect place for a Curt Wild concert to end up.”

            Fetching her phone and USB charging cable out of her purse, Elizabeth hooked her phone up to the car’s stereo, then navigated to U-Tube’s latest URL.  Thankfully, it still hadn’t been caught out yet.  “Any particular live performance I should look for?” she asked.

            “Yeah.  There was a concert in London in the winter of ’75 that Arthur told us about a few times.  It wasn’t just Curt, but a lot of the stars of glam.”

            “Winter of 1975?” Elizabeth repeated, her memory dredging up something from before her journey began.  “Early February?”

            “Yeah.  The one year anniversary of when Brian Slade pulled the least funny prank of all times.”  Cliff cast a glance at her for a moment.  “Why?”

            “Um, I read something about that.”  She laughed nervously.  “Someone claimed a UFO showed up over the venue later that night.”

            Cliff laughed.  “Given what that crowd was like, it would have just been a hallucination.  Acid was still a big thing in the ‘70s.  Peyote and San Pedro cactus, too.”

            Elizabeth nodded.  That was what the friend of the person who saw it had said.  “So what do I type into the search engine?  Just ‘Curt Wild 1975’ or—”

            “Death of Glitter,” Cliff said.  “That was the name of the concert.  I admit I’m pushing you right into the deep end with this, but it’s a great cross-section of the whole genre of glam rock.  Everyone but Brian Slade was there.”  He cleared his throat.  “Well, maybe not _everyone_ , but a lot of the biggest names.  And Curt was in rare form.  I’ve seen the recording before; he was even more intense than usual.”

            “Okay.”  Elizabeth ran the search for ‘Death of Glitter concert’ and came up with a surprisingly large number of hits, most of which seemed to be the right thing.  There was one that claimed to be the whole concert, though, so she selected that one.

            The screen went dark, but spotlights were soon lit on a coffin standing on a stage.  Out of the coffin stepped a man in a top hat and tailcoat, but instead of a waistcoat and pants, he was wearing a leather bodice and fishnet stockings.

            “What the fuck I am looking at?!” Elizabeth exclaimed, without meaning to.

            Cliff started laughing, hard.  “Welcome to glam rock.”

 

***

 

            The drive east from Jackson was a tough education for Elizabeth.  She was used to not understanding the lyrics of the songs she listened to because they were in Japanese, not because they were in utterly unfathomable English.  Or, in Curt Wild’s case, because half of the words were enunciated so poorly that she had no idea what they were…and she was probably happier not knowing.  Though she had intended only to listen to Curt’s music so she wouldn’t make a fool of herself when—if—they found him, Cliff had insisted on giving her a thorough crash course on all of glam.  In all honesty, she liked Brian Slade’s music better than Curt Wild’s, but from the interview footage she watched of the two of them, she had a feeling that as a person she would like Curt better than Brian any day of the week; he seemed more human, and less like an artful posture.

            Every so often—at least once a day—the lesson got too much for her, and Elizabeth would insist on listening to some of her _own_ music.  Most of her Vocaloid playlists didn’t go over too well, but Cliff was at least tolerant of her fondness for synthetic vocals and cheery J-Pop.  (Cliff much preferred her Gackt playlist, particularly after she showed him a picture of what Gackt looked like.)

            After they had been meandering eastward at a slow pace for a few days, Elizabeth finally got up her nerve to ask where they were going, specifically.

            “Detroit,” Cliff told her.  “There’s a guy I know who lives there.  And if anyone knows where to find Curt Wild, he will.”

            “I wonder if you should call him and let him know we’re coming?”

            Cliff chuckled.  “I don’t know his number, and it’s unlisted.  But I know where his shop is.  Don’t worry.”

            Being told not to worry always made her worry more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, I haven't seen "Pump Up the Volume" in ages. I really liked it back when it first came out. No idea if I'd still like it now...


	20. Chapter 20

            Aside from being pulled over once or twice because Cliff was driving too _slowly_ , the trip to Detroit went without incident, and soon the van was navigating down grimy streets past masses of unemployed humanity.  The ruined skyline in the background attested more to the poverty of the urban center—and the nation as a whole, given the city’s dependence on the automotive industry—than to any damage from the war.  It was far more depressing than the scar of destruction remaining in New York:  at least in New York, the people had maintained their strength of heart, pulled together to keep forging on, even if they couldn’t get the government to sign off on clearing away the rubble and rebuilding.  It seemed like the people of Detroit had simply given up.  Most everyone who could afford it had moved out ages ago, and all that was left were the poor, the unemployed, and the unfortunate souls still shackled to the half-functioning automotive manufacturing plants that dotted the city and its surroundings.

            “Good thing this is an American car,” Elizabeth commented as they drove past a small mob of people standing by the side of the road and looking miserable.

            “You’d never have made it through this city alive in a Japanese car,” Cliff sighed, shaking his head.  “Things didn’t used to be so touchy.  Before the war, no one cared what kind of car you were driving.”

            Elizabeth nodded.  “I know.  My parents had a Volvo.  I don’t think they even still make those anymore.”

            “I'm sure they still make ‘em,” Cliff replied.  “They just don’t bother sending any to America anymore.  That’s the first I’ve heard you mention your family,” he added.

            She sighed.  “I generally try not to think about them.  They were killed in the war:  a business trip to the wrong city at the wrong time.”

            “I’m sorry.  How old were you?”

            “I was in college.  But neither of them had much family, and none of them were local, so I was left pretty much on my own.”

            “Maybe I should adopt you,” Cliff suggested.

            Elizabeth laughed, but couldn’t think of anything to say in response, and they drove on in silence for some time.  The silence was only broken when Cliff pulled over and parked in front of a store labeled as selling “musical sundries.”

            “What is this place?” Elizabeth asked.  The door to the shop had an open sign on it, but the shutters over the windows were pulled down, and from the amount of graffiti on them, they hadn’t been opened in years.

            “This is where my contact lives.”  Cliff paused, looking into the backseat of the van.  “Probably best not to leave anything valuable inside, just in case.  We shouldn’t be here long, and it’s broad daylight, but…well, you never know in a town like this has become.”

            Elizabeth nodded, climbing into the backseat.  She put her purse and laptop over one shoulder, the bag with the books over the other, and carried Yuzu in her arms as she left the van.

            Cliff looked at her critically.  “I don’t think anyone’s going to steal your doll,” he said, pursing his lips when he finished talking.

            “I’m not taking that chance!”  After all, they might steal the whole van!

            Cliff sighed, and shook his head.  “Guess it can’t hurt.”  So saying, he led the way inside the store.

            As Elizabeth followed him inside, she was momentarily dumbfounded by the chaotic interior.  Instruments of literally every variety—from pre-Columbian-looking South American pipes to harpsichords to electric guitars and synthesizer keyboards—alongside sheet music and recorded music on everything from vinyl and 8-tracks to CDs and iTunes download cards.  Supplies and items for the care of instruments lined the walls, in between displays of the hardware needed to play the recordings, interspersed here and there with album and tour posters from the 1950s up to one from last year.  Everything was jumbled up, cheek by jowl, as if the whole store was inside a snowglobe someone had recently shaken very vigorously.

            The only person in the store other than Elizabeth and Cliff was an old man at least in his 70s, sitting behind a cash register that looked like it dated to the ‘70s.  He peered at Cliff through Coke-bottle glasses for a minute or two, then grinned.  “Is that Cliff Wise?” he asked.  His voice didn’t sound as old as he looked.

            “It is,” Cliff assured him, with a matching grin.

            The old man got up from behind the counter as Cliff approached, and the two of them met in the middle of the chaos, exchanging a clap-on-the-back type of hug.  “How’s Sandy?”

            Cliff’s smile evaporated.  “He’s gone,” he said quietly.  “Car accident.  A couple of years back.”

            “I’m so sorry.”  The old man patted Cliff’s arm in a friendly manner.  “I know how you feel; I lost my wife to cancer last winter.”

            Cliff expressed his own sympathies, and they exchanged several tedious minutes of dialog about people and places Elizabeth had never heard of.  Finally, the old man asked Cliff what had brought him to the ruins of Detroit.  Cliff nodded, and gestured Elizabeth closer.  “This is Elizabeth,” he said, “and she’s looking to meet Curt Wild.  Thought you could help.”  Then he turned to look at her.  “This, by the way, is Freddy, one of the original members of Curt’s band, the Rats.”

            The old man grinned at her.  “Nice to see people showing an interest in Curt again.”

            Elizabeth nodded uncomfortably.  How many times was she going to have her ‘guilt’ button pressed over her ludicrous reason for searching out a former star?  “So, do you know where he is?”

            Freddy shook his head.  “Not really.”

            “Well, is he…I mean…is there any chance that he’s…um…”

            Freddy laughed at her hesitation.  “Curt Wild will never die,” he announced firmly.  “Curt, Jack, Brian, none of them will ever die.  When their time comes, they’ll be taken up to the stars where they belong.  Just like Oscar Wilde was.”

            Elizabeth’s jaw might have dropped just a little bit.  This guy not only believed in UFOs, but thought that Oscar Wilde hadn’t actually died—that he had been abducted by aliens on his death bed?  What the _fuck_?

            “You must have some idea where Curt is,” Cliff prodded.  “He can’t still be in New York after all this time.”

            “Nah, he left the country years back,” Freddy said.  “Crossed the border into Canada during the final stretch of the war.”  He shrugged.  “We tried to stay in touch for a few years, but the tighter the border got, the harder it was to do that, until Curt finally sent me a letter that literally said ‘fuck it.’  Made me contact everyone else in America he’d been trying to keep in touch with to let them know he wasn’t going to bother anymore.  I loved the guy like a brother, but damn, if he didn’t always make extra work for everyone around him!”

            Cliff sighed sadly.  “Guess that’s the end of that, then.  It takes months at best to get a proper exit visa, and they’d never let us across the border just to talk to someone.”

            Elizabeth nodded, but her brain kept the idea of crossing the border percolating for the entire, lengthy time that Cliff and Freddy spent catching up on absolutely everything under the sun.  She’d been granted a visa to cross the border into Canada on very short notice once before…

            By the time they left the shop, they had been inside for more than an hour, and Elizabeth was seriously worried that the van (and all her clothes) would be gone.  But the van was still there, and a couple of twenty-something men were leaning against it.  They looked like tough characters at first glance, but the way they were holding hands somewhat robbed their appearance of its vicious edge.  Though it really shouldn’t have, Elizabeth reminded herself:  the Theban Sacred Band was in its day one of the most powerful armies in Ancient Greece, and it was composed purely of homosexual couples.  Any perception that a gay man was not capable of being dangerous was the homophobic invention of modern society.

            One of the two men looked at the other.  “Told you so,” he said.

            The other nodded.  “And I didn’t argue.”  Then he looked over at Cliff and Elizabeth.  “We’ve got old man Freddy’s back,” he explained.  “Anyone here to shop with him is safe.”

            “I’m glad to hear it,” Cliff replied.

            As the two men walked away, Elizabeth noticed that the Asian-American one had a tattoo that said “Maxwell Demon Lives!” and the African-American one’s jacket had Curt Wild’s twenty-something face airbrushed on the back.

            Elizabeth got into the van via the side door so she could put down her laptop, the books, and Yuzu, before resuming her seat.  As Cliff was starting up the van, she looked over at him.  “If I could get us a border permit, would you want to go into Canada and look for Curt up there?”

            “That’s a mighty big ‘if,’ little lady.”

            “Not really.  The reason I didn’t have any family around at home was because they all live in Canada.  I think I can get us in without having to wait long.”

            Cliff raised a speculative eyebrow.  “This should be worth seeing,” he commented.

 

***

 

            They took a hotel room on the outskirts of Detroit, near the Canadian border.  If they were going to have to stay the night, they’d need to get a second room, but for the moment, one was sufficient.  The room was really only to get a more reliable phone line.  Cell phones were all too frequently monitored, after all.  Though maybe hotel phones weren’t much better; ideally, they should have called from that shop…

            Elizabeth used the contacts section of her phone to get the number of the cousin she knew best, and called her using the hotel’s phone.  It was soon answered.

            “Hi, Sally?  It’s Elizabeth,” she said, hoping Sally didn’t have any friends also named Elizabeth.

            “Elizabeth!  It’s been so long!  What are you doing with yourself?  How are things in St. Louis?  Did you finally quit that awful job of yours?”

            “Ah…this may take a while,” Elizabeth sighed, before getting down to her familial duty of filling her cousin in on all the shit that had happened in her life in the four or five years since they had last spoken.  “Anyway, there’s someone I’ve been trying to talk to, and it turns out he left during the war, went north into Canada.  So I was hoping maybe you could help me get a border pass.  It worked to get me across the border in time for your wedding, after all.”  Of course, that had been 2001, so the border hadn’t been all that tight yet.

            “Hmm…if you’d been asking in the spring, we could have had you come to my daughter’s middle school graduation, but that’s long over with.”  For almost a minute, all Elizabeth could hear through the phone was the sound of Sally breathing.  “Oh, that’s it!  Jen’s son is going to be christened next week.  I’m sure they wouldn’t deny you the chance to be there.”

            Elizabeth hadn’t even realized Jen was pregnant.  Then again, she didn’t connect with any of her cousins on social media, so maybe that wasn’t actually surprising.  Although she didn’t think Jen was even _married_ …  “That sounds great,” she agreed, hoping the deal did not actually require her to attend the christening.  She’d be glad to send a card and a present, but attending didn’t seem like any fun at all.  “How long do you suppose it’ll take to set that up?”

            “Probably just a day or two, but it’s hard to be sure.  Where are you?  You’re not calling on your cell.  Is something wrong?”

            Elizabeth laughed uncomfortably.  “I was just worried the cell call might be intercepted,” she admitted, feeling like a paranoid fool.  Canadians just didn’t understand what it was like living in a police state!  “As long as you don’t say anything to make it clear there’s other reasons for my trip, you can call me back on my cell,” she added.

            “Okay, I’ll call you when it’s all set up.  You _will_ be coming to Toronto to see us all while you’re in the country, right?”

            “Of course I will,” Elizabeth promised.  There was, in fact, part of her that wanted to call herself a refugee and just _stay_ in Toronto.  At least if she stayed in Canada, she’d probably be able to get a job again…

            “I’ll be sure to let everyone know.  We haven’t seen you in such a long time!”

            Somehow, Elizabeth managed not to say “There’s not much to see.”

            Once the phone call was over, Elizabeth filled Cliff in on the situation.  “And she really thinks that’ll work?” he asked.

            “It should.  I mean, they might have to claim I’m going to be the baby’s godmother or something, but other than that, yeah.  Canada’s very concerned about the happiness of its people, and that includes making sure they don’t get cut off from their south-of-the-border relatives.  The Canadian government just as to put some pressure on the US to get passes for relatives with a legitimate reason to enter Canada.  It’s usually just for weddings and funerals, but a christening should work, too, since it’s religious and all.”

            “Hmm.  Well, I can give it a couple of days.  But I don’t want to spend too long just waiting around,” Cliff told her.  “At my age, the brain starts playing nasty tricks on you when you do that.”

            “Fair enough,” Elizabeth agreed.


	21. Chapter 21

            Thankfully, Sally came through with the border pass early the next day, and they were checked out of the hotel and sitting in front of the border station by ten in the morning.  The border guard looked at them suspiciously as he peered in the driver’s side window.  “Why are you trying to leave the country?” he asked, looking solely at Cliff.

            “Takin’ my gal pal here to a christening in Toronto,” he said.  “The mom’s, what, your cousin?  That right, baby?”

            ‘Baby’ was totally overdoing it, and Elizabeth fought not to grimace.  They had agreed it was best to claim that he was her lover—claiming he was her uncle would never fly, since he’d have been mentioned in the pass if he was a blood relative—but going overboard with the act would just make the guards suspicious.  She had to force herself to smile for the border guard, lest he get even more suspicious.  “Yes, it’s my cousin Jen’s baby.”

            “Why are your cousins in Canada?” he asked.  “They’re liberals who fled the country?”  His tone on ‘liberals’ was not significantly different from the tone a McCarthyist would have used for ‘Commies’ back in the ‘50s.

            “My mother’s from Canada,” Elizabeth explained.  “When she moved here, her siblings stayed behind.”

            The guard was suddenly looking at her as if she was a contagious disease.  Ugh.  Why the United States wanted to put someone like this in a position where they’d be the first person visitors to the country saw was entirely beyond Elizabeth’s comprehension.  But maybe that was the idea.  Maybe the point was to keep ‘dirty furenners’ from wanting to enter the country in the first place.  Though it seemed unlikely that anyone _would_ want to enter even without this guy.

            The border guard eventually decided he would have to call his superior.  That took at least ten minutes of them sitting there with the engine off and the window rolled down in the broiling heat, so Elizabeth was horribly sweaty by the time the guard grudgingly let them across the checkpoint.

            The other side of the checkpoint was quite the relief.  They handed over their passports and Elizabeth showed the station guard the e-mail with her border pass in it, at which time they had to answer a few routine questions—if they were bringing over any fruits, vegetables, livestock, or undocumented passengers, if they had anything to declare, et cetera—before the guard smiled and stamped their passports.  “Welcome to Canada,” he said as he handed them back.  “I hope you enjoy your stay.”

            “We will,” Cliff assured him.

            “And pass on my congratulations to the new mother,” the guard added.

            “I will,” Elizabeth said.

            Once that was all over, they rolled up the windows, cranked up the AC, and headed for Toronto as fast as the speed limit permitted.  (They both agreed that being pulled over for speeding would be horribly humiliating, and would possibly have terrible consequences on their return to the US.)  Unfortunately, when they got to Toronto, they lost the entire rest of the day.  Elizabeth had to visit with all her family—the number of whom had considerably increased since she was last in Toronto—and Cliff said he was just as happy taking the afternoon off to just relax in her cousin’s nicely air-conditioned house.  Luckily, her cousin’s daughter was away at camp; Cliff could have the guest room, and Elizabeth could have the daughter’s room, so no hotel was necessary.

            But that meant Elizabeth didn’t get any time to herself until it was time to go to bed for the night.

            After spending a few minutes photographing Yuzu with some of the girl’s more interesting toys, Elizabeth did something she knew she absolutely shouldn’t:  she sat down at the desk and turned on the computer.  Her own might still be region-locked from any but the US Wikipedia.  If she wanted to see the Canadian one, it was going to go more smoothly if she was using a Canadian computer.  As soon as it was loaded, she went straight to Curt Wild’s biographical entry.

 

***

 

**Curt Wild** (born Curtis Charles Wilde; June 3, 1946[1]) is an American-born singer and songwriter.  In his American career, he released 8 albums, of which five have gone gold.  Though only five of his songs made the traditional Top 10 lists, he was one of the most influential singers of the 1970s, as his music was listened to with almost religious zeal by his industry, even when it didn’t click with audiences.[2]  He has released two more albums since the year 2000, consisting half of new material, and half of updates and re-recordings of old material, as well as a greatest hits album, and a collection of live performances.[3]

 

Despite rock legends to the contrary, Wild was raised in a trailer park in Upper Michigan, where his parents’ strict religious agenda conflicted with the hedonistic lifestyle urged on him by his elder brother.[4]  Wild first learned to play guitar in his early teens, but he had been singing since he was a small child.[5]  Wild left his family’s trailer while he was still a teenager, moving alone to Detroit, where he formed his first band, the Rats.  Their debut album was released in 1970, to mixed results.  It was not until his third album, “Danger Zone,” produced in collaboration with Brian Slade, that Wild gained the commercial and critical success for which he is best known.  However, it was his next album, featuring Jack Fairy, that was the peak of his career, critically and commercially.[6]

 

He received only one Grammy Award, though he was nominated five times.  He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, at the same time as Brian Slade, Jack Fairy and several other major figures from the glam rock subgenre, though the only artist to put in an appearance at the ceremony was Polly Small.[5]

 

In the 1970s, Curt Wild was almost more infamous than famous:  before “Danger Zone,” his biggest claim to fame was the media frenzy when he became the lover of Brian Slade.[6]  During nearly the entirety of that decade, Wild struggled against a crippling heroin addiction, a fact that many of his managers chose to exploit in order to cheat him of the profits he deserved for his art, rather than trying to help him break his addiction.[7]  It was not until his arrest in 1979 for possession of heroin and cocaine that he finally managed to break his addictions during state-mandated rehab.[8]

 

Following the tragedy that befell much of Michigan in the misfire of Chicago’s missile defense system late in World War III, Wild left the United States, crossing the border into Canada.[9]  In 2001, when President Brown signed legislation outlawing homosexuality, Curt Wild was among roughly 60,000 American homosexuals and bisexuals who were officially granted Canadian citizenship as refugees fleeing persecution.[10]  At his wedding in 2004, Wild officially retired; his press release stated that he didn’t think a rock career and marriage went well together, and insisted that his new house on the north coast of Baffin Island was “too remote for me to work for a living.”[11]  Despite his retirement, he still sometimes gives benefit performances to aid LGBT charities, or to raise money to provide shelter for refugees fleeing the United States.[12]

 

***

 

            Just that opening segment of the entry was enough to tell Elizabeth what she needed to know; there was no need to slog through the rest, especially since it seemed to be at least two or three times as long as the American version had been.  Instead, she went gratefully to sleep, glad that this hadn’t been a wasted trip across the border.

            The next morning, Elizabeth told Cliff what she had learned from the uncensored Wikipedia entry.  “New Curt Wild albums?” he repeated, his eyes positively lighting up.  “Hot damn, if that didn’t make this whole trip worth it!”  He let out a jubilant laugh.  “So where’s this Baffin Island place?”

            “Up at the Arctic Circle,” Sally told him.  “At this time of year, the snow’s probably all melted, though, and the sun will be up, so it won’t be too bad.”

            Cliff laughed sadly.  “Well, Freddy did say Michigan wasn’t cold enough anymore.  Guess Curt wanted to chase the cold weather.”

            “Hope he’s got a spacesuit,” Sally sighed.  Cliff started laughing so much that Sally first blanched, and then started to redden.  “What?!  What’s so funny about that!?”

            “I think he’s laughing because we were talking to one of Curt Wild’s former band members the other day, and he expressed his absolute certainty that Curt would never die, just be taken away in a flying saucer.”

            “Don’t they have mental health facilities in the US anymore?” Sally asked.

            “Not really.”

            Sally shook her head.  “You’re not really planning on going back, are you?”

            Elizabeth shrugged.  “I didn’t plan to stay, but I don’t exactly relish the idea of returning to more Reynolds tyranny.  The son’s even worse than the father was.”  She shook her head.  “I’m not going to even bother thinking about my future until after I’ve done what I came here to do.”

            “Okay, but remember that your family’s all here,” Sally pointed out.  “And I guarantee you can get a residency permit right away.”

 

***

 

            Their actual departure from Toronto was delayed because Cliff insisted on finding a record store and buying the new Curt Wild albums.  Thankfully, the first one they went to had both the new ones and the live performances dual-CD collection.  They were out of the greatest hits album, but even Cliff admitted that he didn’t actually need it.  Of course, he insisted that he _did_ need to listen to the new albums right away.

            When the new albums had all been listened to—twice!—Cliff decided to continue Elizabeth’s education in the mysteries of ‘70s glam, not only the music, but the subculture that had arisen around it.  Canada’s YouTube had access to dozens—if not hundreds—of British documentaries on the subject, both news footage from the ‘70s and more recent documentaries looking back on the phenomenon, and Cliff insisted that she needed to watch as many of them as she could.

            They didn’t really worry too much about precisely where they were going until they reached Rankin Inlet, the town where they spent their first night in the province of Nunavut.  The clerk who checked them in at the hotel asked what brought them to town, and Cliff replied “Just passing through.”

            “Where are you headed?”

            Cliff didn’t seem to want to answer, so Elizabeth decided she’d better pick up the slack.  “This may sound silly, but I read online that Curt Wild was living up on Baffin Island.  We were really hoping to meet him, so we’re headed there.”

            The clerk laughed.  “That’s a long drive just to meet a singer!  Why didn’t you wait for his next tour?”

            “Well, my uncle here might not last that long,” Elizabeth said, with a tight smile.  “And he’s the one who’s the big fan.”

            “You…”

            “What route were you planning on taking to the island?” the clerk asked.

            Elizabeth laughed nervously.  “Well, Google maps seemed to indicate there was a bridge or something…”  She hadn’t really explored that part very closely yet.

            The clerk chuckled.  “You should have checked out the Nunavut Tourism Board’s website.  There’s a ferry, newly opened, that’ll take you up to Arctic Bay.”  She began typing on the computer in front of her.  “Yes, this is what I thought.  Curt Wild lives in Snowden, a little town about an hour from where the ferry lands on the island.”

            “Oh!  That sounds perfect!” Elizabeth exclaimed.  “Where does the ferry leave from?”

            “The pier at Ellsworth.  It’s pretty much straight north from Rankin.  Shouldn’t take more than a day or two to get there from here.”

            With the kind of big smile that she usually had to force, Elizabeth thanked the clerk for her help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've forgotten, at this point, how many of the place names I had to invent for this. I know the town Curt's living in was one I had to make up, but I'm not sure about the town with the ferry. I do know that however many names it was, I went with the names of people who led expeditions to the area in the early days of its exploration, the kind of people who often get towns named after them (no matter how inappropriately).


	22. Chapter 22

            By the time they reached Ellsworth, the days rarely got much above 70°, and at night it was positively chilly.  The next ferry wasn’t going to leave for two days, and everyone said that Baffin Island would be several degrees colder, so Elizabeth decided she’d better buy herself some warmer clothes while they were waiting.  Cliff insisted that he could tough it out without even a jacket, but Elizabeth wasn’t going to stand for that, and she bought him a new coat without his permission, swearing that she’d use force to make him wear it if she had to.  (Even though she surely wouldn't.)

            Once the shopping was done, Elizabeth dug out the warmest-looking clothes she could find in Yuzu’s luggage, and hit the sights in town, which was mostly the waterfront and the barren, treeless expanse of rocks and scrub outside town.

            The night before the ferry left, Elizabeth felt decidedly nervous, and could barely sleep, and yet she was strangely sanguine as Cliff pulled the van onto the ferry and it began its slow course up through the narrow, frigid waters.  In contrast, the further the boat went, the more Cliff became a bundle of nerves.

            “Haven’t seen him since ’97,” he explained uncomfortably.  “Haven’t even seen a photo more recent than that.  What if he’s a withered old man?  I don’t know if I can handle that…”

            “Er…is he that much older than _you_ are?  He must be, what, about 70?”

            “And I’m _only_ 62, I’ll have you know!  That’s an enormous difference.  I’m not even old enough to retire!”

            Elizabeth sighed.  “I’m sure he’s totally normal for a man his age.”

            “All those drugs can prematurely age a person…”

            “Are you saying you _don’t_ want to meet him?  After driving all this way?”  _That_ didn’t make much sense!

            “No.  Yes.  I don’t know!”

            Elizabeth laughed.  “You’re flipping out.”

            “How would _you_ feel if you were going to meet your teenage heartthrob as an old man?”

            Elizabeth shrugged.  “Closest I’ve got to one of those is Harrison Ford, and I lost interest by the time I was in college.”

            “Oh, he was hot when he was young.”

            “Yeah.”  Hot enough that Elizabeth used to think she actually liked him that way.  Even though he was about the same age as her parents.  Though maybe that, deep down, had been her clue that she couldn’t really like anyone that way; he’d been more of a surrogate—and more interesting—father than a figure of romantic fantasy.  Probably that was why she had lost interest so spontaneously; when her real father died, another father-figure to dredge up the pain was the last thing she wanted.

            Cliff seemed calmer after their little talk, but he was getting antsy again by the time the ferry arrived in port.  Elizabeth even suggested that she should drive, but Cliff wasn’t having any of _that_ , just as he hadn’t for the entire trip.  The blow to his masculine pride was enough to calm his nerves—somehow—and he seemed calm and collected as they drove the relatively short distance to Snowden, the next town over.

            It was a very small town, and all the buildings looked quite new, yet it was laid out in a very old-school style, with a town square around which all the other buildings radiated.  Cliff parked the van at a meter on the town square, and they decided to split up and ask around about where they could find Curt…though Elizabeth ended up taking pictures of Yuzu in the picturesque little park at the center of the town square instead.  It had all these fun little statues that were just perfect for doll posing!

            “What an interesting doll,” a woman’s voice commented from behind Elizabeth as she was taking a photo of Yuzu perched on top of a statue of a blimp.  “Such pretty clothes she’s wearing!  Did you sew them yourself?”

            Elizabeth turned to look at the woman, feeling her cheeks heat up with shame.  “Actually, I’m all thumbs,” she had to admit.  “I bought the clothes on Etsy.”

            The woman just smiled and shook her head, as if to say that she shouldn’t have expected any better from Elizabeth’s generation.  She was, after all, about sixty-five or so; just the right age to be disappointed in her children and ready to dote on her grandchildren.  At that age, though, she might be the perfect person to ask…

            “Um, do you live in this town?” Elizabeth asked.

            “One of the first settlers,” the woman laughed.  “Are you thinking of moving here?  We should keep having winter here long after the rest of the world turns into an arid desert.”

            Yeah, _that_ made it sound tempting.  “Actually, I’m looking for someone I heard lives here,” Elizabeth said, taking out her phone and calling up the image of Curt Wild from that photo album she saw back in New York.  “This is an old picture, but this man here, the blond one…”

            The woman looked at her phone, and sighed wistfully.  “Ah, dear Curt was _such_ a looker back in the day!  I wish I’d met him back before he gave up on women!”

            “Then you know him?”

            “Oh, my, yes.  He and his husband moved here not long after they got married.  Curt’s not really one for town planning meetings and such, but his husband usually drags him in whether he likes it or not.”  She laughed.  “Then he ends up getting more worked up and involved than anyone else in the room.  But that’s always been his charm, you know.  Throws himself completely into whatever he’s doing.”

            Elizabeth nodded.  “Can you tell me where to find him?”

            “Of course, dear.  Just go up to the corner there, turn left onto Andersen street, and drive for about a mile—maybe a mile and a quarter.  Huge gray house with blue trim.  Only house in sight for all the rocks.  Can’t miss it.”

            “Thanks so much!”

 

***

 

            Curt Wild’s house looked exactly as the woman in town had described it.  An old-fashioned house that looked like it would be at home on the Scottish moors, nestled in among the rocks of an arctic landscape that supported only coarse grasses and stubby little bushes.  The ocean was just visible beyond the house as the van drove up to park in the wide turn-around in front of the house, white surf beating relentlessly against the pebbled shore.

            Carefully, Elizabeth removed her two books from their boxes, and put all three volumes in the same bag, then took the letters from each and set them in one of the boxes.  “Okay, I’m ready,” she announced, more to herself than to her companion.

            “You’re not taking your doll, are you?”

            “I wasn’t planning on it, no.”

            “Thank God!”  Cliff’s words were more like a sigh of relief.

            “Just, um, about the books?  I mean, about _your_ book…what if he wants them back?  Are you okay with that?”

            “Of course,” Cliff said, with a warm smile.  “How could I refuse him anything?”

            Elizabeth put the bag over her shoulder, and steeled herself before walking over to the door and ringing the bell.  For about a minute, nothing happened, and Elizabeth began to wonder if she should ring again, or if that would be rude.  Just as she began to lean towards another push on the doorbell, she heard footsteps approaching the door from within.

            The door was opened by an older man with somewhat leathery skin, a strong cleft chin, and long white hair pulled back in a ponytail.  He didn’t look 71—as he had to be, based on his Wikipedia entry—but there was no question that he absolutely was Curt Wild.  He looked at Elizabeth and Cliff with confusion.  “Who’re you?” he asked.

            “Um, my name’s Elizabeth,” she squeaked.  “I, uh, I came here because—um—see, I found these—well—”

            Curt laughed.  “You don’t have to try and say it all in one breath.”

            Elizabeth’s whole face felt like the surface of the sun, despite the chill in the air.  She reached into her bag and pulled out one of the books.  “So, er, I found these books—the collected works of Oscar Wilde?—and it seemed like maybe they used to belong to you?”

            Curt looked down at the book, and shrugged.  “Doesn’t look particularly familiar.  What makes you think it was ever mine?”

            “Well, this one, it had a letter in it from your grandfather Daniel to Oscar, and—”

            “Grandfather?” Curt repeated.  “He was my great-grandfather.”

            “Really?  Ancestors.com said he was your grandfather.”

            Curt shrugged.  “I think I’d know my own grandfather’s name.”

            “How did they miss a generation?”  Elizabeth was more thinking aloud than actually asking.

            “My old man had the same name as his father.  That probably confused them.”

            “Oh.  Yes, that makes sense.”  Sort of.  “Any—anyway, um, with that letter being in the first volume, I thought these books were probably Oscar Wilde’s personal copy, and that when he died, the books and the letter were returned to—”

            “Can you get to the point?  I was never very patient, even when I was young.”  Despite the harsh words of his interruption, Curt’s face wore a warm, friendly expression.

            “Oh!  Um, yes.  Sorry.  Well, so, I thought, um, since the other two volumes had letters to you in them, that they probably belonged to you…”

            “Maybe.  We gave away a lot of our stuff when we left New York,” Curt explained.  “Way the fuck easier than trying to drag it all up to Canada with us.”  He paused a moment, then smiled, with a warm chuckle.  “So you have all three volumes there?”

            Elizabeth nodded, replacing Volume One in the book, and taking out Volume Three.  “Um, what about this pin?” she asked, showing him the cover.  “Isn’t it yours?”  She had found pictures of him wearing it in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s…

            Curt’s eyes softened as he looked down at the book in her hands.  One hand reached out and a single finger stroked the pin’s surface, a loving caress.  “Never seen it before,” he announced as he withdrew his hand.  A more obvious lie Elizabeth hadn’t heard since she stopped watching the Committee-sanctioned news reports.  “You might as well keep it,” he added, with a bit of a grin.

            Something about those words made her even more flustered than she already was, and Elizabeth tried to distract herself by putting the book back in the bag and taking out the box with the letters.  “What about the, uh, the letters?” she asked, opening the box.  “Did you want them back?”

            “What are they?”  He peered into the box, but made no move to remove its contents.

            “You don’t want to look for yourself?”  Wasn’t that the normal thing to do in this situation?

            Curt pursed his lips, staring down at her through narrowed eyes.  “Wouldn’t do me much good,” he sighed, shaking his head.  “My eyes aren’t what they used to be.  Can’t really read without glasses, and I hate those fucking things.”  Unconsciously, Elizabeth found herself adjusting her own glasses.  “I usually use audio books now.  Or have things read to me.  My husband’s not really the chatty type; it makes a good excuse to listen to his sexy voice.”

            “Er…”  What was she supposed to say to that extraneous information?  “Um, so…the letters, uh…the first one’s—like I said—from Daniel Wilde to Oscar Wilde, and it’s mostly, uh, about him seeing a UFO over Detroit…”

            Curt laughed.  “I remember that!”  He shook his head.  “Yeah, they saw it in Paris, too.  Someone stumbled on that information when we were in France back in ’73, and they came up with this whole fucked-up theory about how Oscar Wilde was really an alien, or got taken away to another planet that would appreciate him better or something.  Can’t remember who started saying that now.  Might have been Harley…”

            Despite herself, Elizabeth immediately began imagining Harley Quinn talking animatedly with Brian Slade, twirling her over-sized wooden mallet about as she fangirled crazily.  Elizabeth had to cough to dispel the image before she could keep going.  “Then, um, these other two are both addressed to you.”

            “Who from?”

            “The, uh, the first one’s from Brian Slade,” Elizabeth said quietly.  According to Cliff, Curt might be sensitive about that break-up, even after all this time.

            “From when?” Curt asked, sounding more confused than hurt.

            “Oh, uh, 1973, I think it said?  Er, it sounded like you’d been delayed in London by some kind of paperwork, and—”

            Curt laughed.  “Oh, fuck, _that_ letter.”  He shook his head.  “Should’ve signed Oscar Wilde’s name instead of his own.  Guess it was kind of impressive that he managed to string together that many quotes into something that sort of pretended to be a real letter, but…damn, that pissed me off.”

            Elizabeth bit her lip.  Did that mean he _didn’t_ want it back?  Either way, she didn’t exactly feel comfortable keeping it.

            “What about the other letter?” Curt asked.  “Who’s it from?”

            “Um, it’s from Arthur Stuart,” she said.  “It, uh, it looks like it came from the front lines of the war.  After he—after he was assumed dead…”

            Curt’s smile faded.  “How did that get…”  His voice trailed off, and his lips pressed together for a moment or two.  It was the most serious, somber look he’d had on his face this whole time.  “That was…”  He stopped again, and shook his head.  “I seem to have a talent for falling for guys who hurt me after the break-up by seeming to die.  At least Arthur didn’t do it on purpose.”  He sighed.  “That whole war was bullshit.”

            “Yeah.”  What else could she say?

            “You know who really killed Reynolds?” Curt asked.  “Arthur figured it out at the time, you know.  He was two-thirds of the way through an article exposing the truth when Brown decided to lay the blame on Iraq.”  He chuckled weakly.  “We weren’t even speaking to each other at that point, but when the rug got yanked out from under his story, he still called me up to bitch about it, because there was no one else who was gonna listen.”

            “He knows who really killed Reynolds?  Why hasn’t he ever told anyone?”

            Curt laughed.  “He did.  Just no one in America was allowed to hear the truth.”

            “So…who was it that really did it?”

            “Well, the guy pulling the trigger was just a hired gun,” Curt said.  “Ex-military of some sort.  I forget the details.  But he was working for the Secretary of State.  Guy vanished right after the assassination, then right about the time Brown’s declaring war and turning a little peace-keeping exercise into World War fucking Three, the Secretary’s suddenly announced to have been assassinated, too.”  Curt shook his head.  “They silenced him to make sure he didn’t do anything else to bring down the new regime.”

            There was a terrible, awful perfection to that explanation, and it made Elizabeth’s stomach quiver.  Trying to distract herself, she took the letters out of the box, and held them out towards Curt.  “So…you want these back, right?”

            “Yeah.”  He took them from her with a gentleness that bordered on reverence.

            An awkward silence fell on them.  To cover up her inability to find anything to say, Elizabeth put the box back in her bag while she tried to think what else to say.  _Was_ there anything else to say?  She didn’t want to compliment him on his music, because she had so little knowledge or understanding of popular music that she was sure to expose her ignorance if she even brought the subject up.

            “So you came all the way here just to return these?” Curt eventually asked, lifting the letters slightly.

            “Um…sort of?”

            “And you?” he asked, looking at Cliff.  “What’s your deal?  You her mute man-servant or something?”

            Cliff laughed.  “No, no, just a friend lending a hand.  Or a wheel.  Her car was attacked for being a foreign make.  And I didn’t have anything better to do.”  He smiled.  “Besides, I was glad of a chance to see you again.”

            “We know each other?”

            “Not really, but you _were_ at my wedding.”

            “Oh?”

            Cliff nodded.  “1986.  My late husband Sandy was a friend of Arthur’s from the press club.”

            Curt laughed.  “Okay, yeah, all you had to do was say you were marrying a guy.  Not many gay marriages in the ‘80s.”

            “Considering they’re not legally recognized, that hasn’t changed any,” Cliff sighed.

            “They’re legally recognized in most of the world outside the US now,” Curt told him.  “Canada legalized first, back in 2002, in reaction to Brown’s homophobic policies.  All of Europe, and most of South America have legalized same-sex marriage now, too.  Can’t remember where else.”

            Elizabeth sighed.  “I feel like I need to tell all my friends to leave the country.  Sounds like their lives would be better if they were anywhere else in the world.”

            “Given what America’s become, of course they would be,” Curt said.  “I’ve never regretted leaving.  Maybe I shouldn’t have given up my citizenship, so I could have tried to keep voting, but I’m not so sure voting helps anymore.”

            “I don’t think it does.  My vote’s never seemed to matter,” Elizabeth replied mournfully.  “I’ve always voted against the regime continuing, but it’s never helped.  Even most of my picks for the Senate and the House fail.  Hell, I can’t even help get a new cigarette tax passed!”

            Curt laughed.  “Maybe you need to—”  Before he could finish, the sound of a ringing telephone came from within the house.  Sounded like an old-fashioned, attached-to-the-wall-by-wires kind of phone at that.  Elizabeth would have thought no one used those anymore.  “Oh, I gotta get that.  Sorry.  Thanks for bringing these back to me,” Curt said, then closed the door.  From inside the house, his receding footsteps sounded for a second, then all was quiet.

            As they walked back over to the van, Elizabeth couldn’t help feeling that something about the meeting had been rather anti-climactic.

            “Now what?” Cliff asked, as Elizabeth started putting the books back in their boxes.

            Elizabeth shrugged.  “I don’t know,” she admitted.  “I don’t really want to go back to my pointless life.”  She laughed weakly.  “And I kind of…I kind of want to stay here.  To watch and see if someday, when the time comes, a UFO passes over this house…”

            Cliff raised an eyebrow.  “You believe that now?”

            Elizabeth shook her head.  “I feel like I could be converted to believing in it.”

            He chuckled.  “I’m going to go back, you know.  No matter what you do.  Sandy’s waiting for me in Jackson.”

            Elizabeth nodded.  “Can you wait a day or two, while I decide what I want to do with myself?  Trying to call back to St. Louis to explain I want my stuff shipped to Canada isn’t going to work too well, but if you’re going back to the US, you could mail a letter for me.”

            “Or go by in person to explain.  Yeah, I can wait a few days,” Cliff agreed.  “I’d like the chance to talk to Curt some more, anyway.”  He grinned.  “Besides, I want to find out what man managed to put a ring on his finger.”

            “Really?”  Elizabeth shook her head.  “Somehow, I feel like that doesn’t even matter.  He seems happy.  Isn’t that the only really important thing?”

            Cliff shrugged.  “Maybe so.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regarding the reason for the sudden "confusion" about whether Daniel was Curt's grandfather or great-grandfather, I had originally set him as grandfather because Oscar Wilde's grandson (the one who published his letters) is about the same age as Curt would be if he was real. But then I was thinking about it at work one day; the museum where I work is dedicated to the memory of a writer almost exactly Oscar Wilde's age (they even met once), but his descendants of my parents' generation are either great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren. (I don't know the family tree quite well enough to be sure which. I think it's single great, though.) So it seemed to me to be highly improbable that Daniel could be Curt's grandfather, but with another generation in there, Elizabeth would have been less likely to embark on this ludicrous quest in the first place. That's my thinking, anyway.
> 
> I would totally pay money for good fanart of Harley Quinn (original animated series version, naturally) fangirling over Brian (and/or Curt).
> 
> Despite what Elizabeth thinks, I still have an attached-to-the-wall-by-wires telephone. Two of them, in fact. (In addition to portable phones. And my cell.) Personally, I like having a phone that works without electricity, y'know?


End file.
